by Robyn Bolton | Jun 22, 2022 | Innovation, Leadership
“You’re right. It’s counter-intuitive but correct. Good job!”
I wish I could take back those words. Not just because they’re wrong, but because they were the beginning of the end of an innovation team with incredible talent and promise.
How it Began
It was year 2 for the business’ innovation strategy but the first year that a full-time team was in place. The first year team, a consulting firm, did great work building a foundation of deep stakeholder and market insights and identifying several potential areas for new businesses and business models.
Based on the strength of the work, the BU president invested in building a team of 3 full-time employees – one transferred from another part of the organization, the other two were new hires. With the team in place, the President gave them two objectives:
- Design, build, and test a new services business for one of the market opportunities
- Establish the process, governance, and metrics for the innovation team.
The team worked hard for six months. They focused mainly on building the new services business, and even took over another new business, still in the prototyping phase, that was floundering despite early promise. The Architecture work became an afterthought, squeezed out by other priorities.
That’s why the Director of Innovation asked for help. She didn’t have time, but it was still a priority.
About a month into our work, it was time to present the team’s progress to the BU president. The meeting had been on his calendar for several months and we had several conversations in which we previewed the content, and he expressed his eagerness to learn more.
Then he cancelled.
The Call
After the President called my client to cancel the update meeting, she called me. Our conversation went something like this.:
Client: Some things have come up in the core business and the quarter isn’t coming in as strong as expected. The core teams need more of his time so he asked if we could cancel this quarter’s meeting and just meet next quarter. He said he’s confident we’re doing the right things and we should just keep going and let him know if we need anything.
Me: Ok. Is next quarter’s meeting on the books or do we need to schedule it?
Client: It’s already scheduled. Honestly, I told him that he’s doing exactly the right thing. He needs to focus on the core business because if it’s not healthy we won’t have the resources to do what we need to do.
Me: You’re right. It’s counter-intuitive (to tell someone to ignore you) but correct. Good job!
What I did wrong
- I didn’t ask whether this cancellation as a one-off or a habit. If I had asked, I would have learned that he cancelled every meeting, citing an emergency in the core business. As a result, the only updates he received were quick progress update emails. And he never responded.
- I didn’t push for a meeting before next quarter. Things come up and meetings need to be postponed or cancelled. That’s reality. But executives always find time for priority efforts and are rarely comfortable going 3-4 months without a discussing key issues.
- I didn’t suggest a 1:1 to discuss, and likely change, strategy. “I don’t have time” means “it’s not a priority.” So, if the BU President really didn’t have 1 hour every 3 months to work with the innovation team, then innovation, as it was currently scoped, clearly wasn’t a priority.
What you can do right
- Expect engagement. Executives make time for things that are important (and that they’re measured on). Everything else is a “passion project.” If innovation is key to growing tomorrow’s business, then it’s as important as the activities that sustain today’s business. Be it clear that you’re willing to be flexible but, if your boss wants results, you need your boss to actively engage with innovation on a frequent and regular basis.
- Work together to figure out how to work together. In the beginning, it made sense to for the Innovation team and BU President to meet for half a day every quarter. As time went one, it became clear that wasn’t practical. So instead of holding tight to the original plan, we should have acknowledged that things weren’t working and agreed on a different approach that meets everyone’s needs (and worked with our schedules)
- Have the hard conversation. If, despite your best efforts, you still can’t get executives to engage, it’s time to ask the hard questions – “Is what we are working on a priority? Do we need to change our focus? Do we need to disband?” No one likes this conversation. You won’t like it because it could mean the end of the team and your role. The executive doesn’t like it because it means that their efforts and investments in innovation failed. But the same philosophy that applies to new ideas and businesses also applies to innovation teams and efforts – learn fast so you can kill things quickly and move on to the next big thing.
How it ended
The next quarter, a meeting did happen. The innovation team presented their work and the BU President approved funding to develop and test two new business ideas.
Six months later, the company re-organized and a new President took over.
Six months after that, the innovation team was disbanded. The two new hires left the company, the person who transferred in, transferred back out to another part of the organization.
It’s possible that this fate was inevitable, that no matter how much we engaged with the first president, that we still would have been shut down by the second president.
It’s also possible that one more question, one more conversation, one more pivot could have changed everything.
by Robyn Bolton | Jun 14, 2022 | Innovation, Leadership, Tips, Tricks, & Tools
“Can I offer you a bit of advice?”
As an innovator, this question should trigger your fight, flight, or freeze response.
It is often a genuine question asked by a good-hearted colleague who is motivated by a genuine desire to help.
It can also signal the beginning of the end.
Beware Organizational Antibodies
Thanks to COVID-19, we’ve all (re)learned how our bodies’ immune systems work:
A foreign object (a pathogenic bacteria or virus) enters our bodies, and our immune system rallies a bunch of antibodies to identify the unwanted object and neutralize or destroy it.
Yea! Threat neutralized! We’re safe again!
Thank you, antibodies!
Companies work in much the same way (after all, “corporation” traces its roots back to “corpus,” the Latin word for body)
A foreign object (innovation) enters our company, and our immune system (culture, processes, structures) rallies a bunch of antibodies (rules, metrics, stories) to identify the new object and neutralize or destroy it.
Whether you thank the antibodies or curse them depends very much on your point of view. Either way, you can’t argue that the antibodies did precisely what they are designed to do – keep the company operating efficiently with minimum disruption or distraction.
How to spot Organizational Antibodies
Antibodies always appear in human form, usually as allies like colleagues or bosses, and express themselves in a single statement or question.
Here are the five most common:
1. “Can I offer you a bit of advice?” – The antibody is here to help. It wants to spare you the pain your predecessors endured by passing lessons learned and suggestions to make your innovation more acceptable to upper management. Following their advice will neutralize the innovation, transforming it from “something new that creates value” to “something familiar that feels safe.”
2. “Have you thought about…?” – This is a slightly more aggressive antibody than #1, but it operates similarly. Intending to help, this antibody offers an unsolicited and specific piece of advice. If you take the advice, you face the same risk of neutralization as with #1, but if you ignore it, you risk hearing a very public, “I told you so.”
3. “You should talk to (fill in the blank)” – This is another antibody that wants to help, but not enough to do it. It senses the foreignness of your project, so it doesn’t want to get too involved lest it fails. But it wants to do something, so it can claim involvement if your innovation succeeds. So, it sends you to someone it genuinely believes will be helpful. While it’s certainly important to talk to people throughout the company, beware the run-around that results in all talking and no doing.
4. “I don’t have time right now but let’s talk in a month” – This antibody knows that we’re all time-starved, so we won’t argue with this reason. But “I don’t have time” means “It’s not a priority.” If the project isn’t a priority now, it won’t be a priority in a month. And if the project isn’t a priority, it will be starved of resources and die a slow, agonizing death.
5. “Before I can approve this, I need to see (financials, documentation). I’m just holding you to the same standard I hold other projects to.” – When all other antibodies fail, this one is unleashed. Directly or indirectly, it kills every innovation in the organization. It ignores the fact that new things don’t have historical data. It dismisses analogous innovations as too different to be valid. Anything that can’t be proven to be 100% certain contains some amount of risk. And risk must be destroyed.
How to work with Organizational Antibodies
Antibodies mean well. They genuinely want to help. Even when they’re being tough, they believe they’re being fair. It’s essential to respond with an equal measure of kindness and fairness.
Remember, you can’t stop antibodies. You can only hope to contain them with one (or more) of these approaches:
1. Say “Thank you.” – Don’t try to justify, explain, or convince the antibody that they’re wrong. Simply acknowledge that you heard them and say thank you.
2. Ask if they’re open to discussing their suggestion. – Most antibodies have short memories. Once they give advice, they move on to other things and quickly forget about you. But some don’t. Some return to ask what you did or why you didn’t listen to them. As tempting as it is to launch into an explanation or defense, don’t. Ask them if they’re open to a discussion. If they say “yes,” they just agreed to listen to your explanation and (hopefully) engage in a productive conversation. If they say “no” (usually phrased as “not right now”), then you save everyone time and aggravation.
3. Keep a list of people and when you’ll talk to them – You don’t have to talk to everyone before you start. When you are referred to someone, pause to think about when they will be most helpful – at the start of the project, when you have a specific question, or towards the end when you’re working through operational consideration. Keeping a list of who to talk to and when reassures people that you’re collaborating and helps you manage expectations.
4. Before you start, align on priorities – Ultimately, your boss decides what the priorities are. So, no matter how important or urgent something feels to you, if it’s not important or urgent to her, you won’t get the time, attention, or resources you need. Save yourself time and heartache by understanding the important and urgent priorities and aligning your work to those.
5. Before you start, ask, “What do you need to see to say Yes?” – We live in a world of finite resources, which means that every person and dollar you receive is a person or dollar NOT going to another project. So, before you start, ask what the decision-maker needs to make decisions. Suppose the requests are unreasonable (like a 5-year NPV approved by Finance before you even have a proof of concept). In that case, you can try negotiating for more reasonable expectations or shift your focus.
Organizational Antibodies exist in every organization. It’s only a matter of time before they appear and even swarm. For the sake of your innovation efforts and your company’s long-term growth, stay vigilant and have a plan to work with them. It’s how you’ll keep innovation alive.
by Robyn Bolton | Jun 8, 2022 | Innovation, Leadership, Stories & Examples
“Fail Fast”
It’s an innovation mantra uttered by everyone, from an entry-level programmer at a start-up to a Fortune 100 CEO.
But let’s be honest.
NO ONE WANTS TO FAIL!
(at any speed)
The reality is that we work in companies that reward success and relentlessly encourage us to become great at a specific skill, role, or function. As a result, our natural and rational aversion to failure is amplified, and most of us won’t even start something if there’s a chance that we won’t be great at it right away.
It’s why, despite your best efforts to encourage your team to take risks and embrace “failure,” nothing changes.
A Story of Failure?
A few weeks ago, while on vacation, I dusted off an old copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards. As a kid, I was reasonably good at drawing, so I wasn’t worried about being bad, just rusty.
Then I read the first exercise: Before beginning instruction, draw each of the following:
- “A Person, Drawn from Memory”
- “Self-Portrait”
- “My Hand”
I stared at the page. Thoughts raced through my head:
- You have to be kidding me! These are the three most challenging things to draw. Even for a professional!
- How am I supposed to do this without instructions?
- Maybe I’ll skip this step, read the rest of the book to get the instructions I need, then come back and try this once I have all the information.
- Forget it. I’m not doing this.
Confronted by not one but THREE things to be bad at, I was ready to quit.
Then I took a deep breath, picked up my trusty #2 pencil, and started to draw.
The results were terrible.
A Story of Success
It would be easy to look at my drawings and declare them a failure – my husband is missing his upper lip, I look like a witch straight out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and the thumb on my left hand is the same length as my index finger.
But I didn’t fail*.
I started
I did my best
I learned a lot
I did better the next time.
By these standards, my first attempts were a success**
Ask for what you want
Isn’t that what you want your team to do?
To stop analyzing and posturing and start doing.
To do their best with what they have and know now, instead of worrying about all the possibilities.
To admit their mistakes and share their learnings.
To respond to what they learned, even if it means shutting down a project, and keep growing.
Ask them to do those things.
Ask them to “Learn fast.”
Your people want to learn. They want to get smarter and do better. Encourage that.
Ask them to keep learning.
Your team will forget that their first attempt will be uncomfortable and their first result terrible. That’s how learning starts. It’s called “growing pains,” not “growing tickles,” for a reason.
Ask them to share what they learned.
Your team will want to hide their mistakes, but that doesn’t make anyone better or wiser. Sharing what they did and what they learned makes everyone better. Reward them for it.
Ask the team what’s next
It’s not enough to learn one thing quickly. You need to keep learning. Your team is in the trenches, and they know what works, what doesn’t, and why. Ask for their opinions, listen carefully, discuss, and decide together what to learn next.
You don’t want your team to fail.
You want them to succeed.
Ask them to do what’s necessary to achieve that
“Act Now. Learn Fast.”
*Achieving perfect (or even realistic) results on my first attempt is impossible. You can’t fail at something impossible
** To be clear, I’m not making a case for “participation trophies.” You gotta do more than just show up (or read the book). You gotta do the work. But remember, sometimes success is simply starting.
by Robyn Bolton | May 11, 2022 | Innovation
Looking for help with Innovation?
Look no further than the:
- 1.93 billion Google results
- 773, 733 articles in scholarly journals
- Over 60,000 books on Amazon
There is no shortage of information, insights, advice, or research on innovation.
But who has time to read it?
You don’t. You’re too busy doing innovation to spend time reading about or studying it.
Of course, you do what you can – read an article, pick up a book, attend a webinar or conference, talk to a friend or colleague. But you always wonder if there’s something you’re missing. If the silver bullet that will finally make innovating in big companies easier is out there and you’ve missed it.
It’s not out there.
You haven’t missed it.
In fact, everything you need to know is summed up in these 3 sentences.
“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” – Albert Einstein
Successful innovations solve meaningful problems. Yet most innovation teams rush right past the problem and right into creating solutions. And that’s a problem.
95% of innovations fail. The #1 cause of failure is poor product-market fit. The cause of poor product-market fit is a poor understanding of the problem and what the market deems to be a desirable, viable, and feasible solution.
Spend time thinking about the problem. Fall in love with the problem. Embrace the discomfort of not knowing and the mess of figuring it out. Once you understand the problem, home in on the root causes, can articulate the functional/emotional/social Jobs to be Done, and see the frictions that prevent solutions, then and only then should you start thinking about solutions.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain
It seems that in business, it’s better to be confidently wrong than correctly uncertain. Saying “I don’t know” feels like the death knell of your career so it’s no wonder that people will do anything they can to avoid saying it. They’ll position an opinion as a fact, mischaracterize data, and even lie to avoid appearing uncertain.
False certainty is at the heart of so many failures, from unsuccessful products to global financial collapses.
Instead, be honest about what you don’t know and have a plan to learn. And if saying “I don’t know” feels too risky, try:
- I believe…
- I think…
- I would bet my annual/monthly/daily salary that….
Then take action – ask questions and listen to the answers, create prototypes, and run experiments. Do the work required to know.
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Albert Einstein
You poured your heart and soul into your innovation. Through (sometimes literally) blood, sweat, and tears, you created something new that creates value. And now you want everyone to know.
You want everyone to know the intricate details of how it works, to understand the agonizing trial and error you endured, to appreciate every detail of this amazing thing that you created.
No one cares. Everyone stopped listening after 30 seconds. Everyone cares about themselves and their problems. They want their problems to go away and if you have a solution that works, they’ll happily use it. They don’t need details, they need results.
You created something amazing, now tell people about it in the way they want to hear – simply, clearly, and quickly. If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. Even worse, no one will listen long enough to know, understand, or want it.
What’s the 4th sentence?
Across those 1.93 billion Google results, 773, 733 scholarly journal articles, and 60,000+ books there are billions of more sentences. But very few of them are battle-tested, enduring, and true.
The three above fit that bill. What are others?
by Robyn Bolton | May 1, 2022 | Innovation, Leadership
We all want to be successful leaders, and if you’re reading this, you probably want to be a successful innovation leader.
But what does that mean?
What is a leader?
First, let’s clarify what makes a “leader” because we use it as a synonym for “manager,” they’re different.
In a nutshell, leaders have followers, people who choose to work with or for them. Managers have employees, people who must work with them. There are, of course, lots of other differences, and this list is a good starting point.
For this reason, leaders can (and do) exist at any level of the organization, whereas managers exist at higher levels as defined by the company’s org chart. So, while you can be a leader and not a manager, or both a leader and a manager, it’s important to remember that not all managers are leaders.
How can I be a successful leader?
As a designer friend of mine says, “it’s contextual.”
And while that’s true, as you get into the detail, I’d argue that a successful leader is someone who does the right thing in the right way.
Achieving that requires leaders to deliver required results and achieve those results ethically, legally, respectfully, and fairly. If you burn your people out, create or allow a toxic work environment, or engage in any number of harmful behaviors, you may be doing the right thing, but you’re definitely not doing it in the right way.
How can I be a successful innovation leader?
1. Action-oriented: You know that you need to take different actions if you want different results. You balance the need for thinking, exploration, and analysis with the need to create, experiment, engage in real-world learning.
2. Collaborative: You know that collaboration is more than simply showing up to the meeting. To you, collaboration is conversation, and the best conversations are the ones in which you talk less and listen more.
3. Committed: You’re in it for the long haul. You know that change happens slowly then fast and that billion-dollar businesses aren’t built in a quarter or even a year. You’re patient for growth and impatient for profit. You protect your teams from the impatient demands of others.
4. Engaged: You work with the team, talking to customers, building prototypes, and celebrating the wins and the learnings (which may be disguised as failures).
5. Honest: You are honest with yourself and your team. You earn your team’s trust because you don’t play guessing games, you’re transparent about how you make decisions, and you are consistent about how you make those decisions.
6. Intellectually Humble: You recognize and admit that the things you think you know may not be accurate. You are open to being wrong (yes, even publicly) because it’s part of learning.
7. Optimistic realist: You hope for the best and prepare for the worst. You know that things won’t always work out but that the odds of success increase when you do your best and inspire others to do theirs.
8. Tough: You know that “pioneers take the arrows, settlers take the land,” and you’re not afraid to take a few arrows. You know that people will question and doubt you and your team, but the promise of new or better is simply too irresistible.
9. Willing to take smart risks: You know that nothing is truly risk-free and that the further you venture from what’s known, the greater the risk. You also know that’s where the greatest rewards are, too. So you focus on managing and minimizing risks, getting just enough data to make the best next decision possible.
10. ?
#10 is for you
What is missing from this list? What characteristic(s) make you a successful leader of innovation?
by Robyn Bolton | Apr 25, 2022 | Customer Centricity, Innovation
I love engineers*
Engineers are the ultimate problem-solvers. They see a problem and the need to fix it. Engineers believe every solution can be improved, every process can be more efficient, and every system optimized.
Which is why I nearly fell out of my chair when, after explaining (again) the importance of asking 5 Whys when interviewing customers and asking why the team was struggling to do so, an engineer said,
“We troubleshoot the why. Asking would be a show of not knowing.”
Wha?!?!?
In my head, I screamed, “But we don’t know! We don’t know the problem because the customer defines the problem! But people are terrible at defining problems, so we ask why. So that we can understand the root cause, then articulate the problem, then solve it!”
Instead of actually screaming, I took a deep breath and said, “Mmmmmm, interesting.”
Admittedly, not the most helpful response.
Why Asking “Why?” is hard
How often do you ask, “Why?”
How often do people on your team ask, “Why?”
Probably not often and probably for reasons that feel very sensible:
- It’s my job to know why
- I don’t want people to think I don’t know
- I don’t know, but I think I should
- People will think I’m stupid/not good at my job
- I’ll lose credibility, and that will impact my job/job prospects/paycheck
And, let’s be honest, those reasons are quite sensible depending on the circumstance.
But feelings aren’t facts, and I still didn’t understand why problem-solvers struggled to ask, “Why?”
So, I sought out an engineer and asked, “Why?”
He took a deep breath and said, “Mmmmmm, it’s complicated.”
When asking “Why?” should be hard.
There are lots of different types of engineers, but when you focus on engineers working in companies (as opposed to those in academia or research labs), most of them work on machines, code, systems, or processes, that exists or are knowable.
In this context, when there’s a problem, it’s the engineer’s job to identify why the problem occurred and how to fix it.
To troubleshoot the Why, engineers use tools specifically designed to collect and analyze data. While those tools aren’t perfect, engineers know how to calibrate the data by applying different allowances and tool combinations.
“So,” I summarized, “when you’re dealing with something objectively knowable, like a machine or code, and you have a proven tool for troubleshooting, you shouldn’t ask, ‘Why?’ Right?”
“Sure,” replied the engineer, who is very used to me over-simplifying things and knows better than to try to convince me that his long and complicated answer is a better way to go.
When asking “Why?” should be easy
Humans can also be thought of as machines, code, systems, and processes, but, unlike those that engineers work on, we’re not objectively knowable. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio wrote, “We are not thinking machines. We are feeling machines that think.”
In this context, when a human has a problem, the human is the only one who knows why the problem occurred. This means that we must find the Why before we can troubleshoot it.
Finding the Why and troubleshooting in this circumstance is challenging because we don’t have tools specifically designed to collect and analyze data. We ARE the tools. We must ask the right questions and listen without assuming or interpreting to ensure that we get accurate answers.
How to make asking “Why?” easier
As a problem-solver, it’s always essential that you find the root cause.
How you find that root cause varies.
If the problem is occurring in something that is objectively knowable and accurately measured and assessed with proven tools, then yes, it IS your job to know why there’s a problem and troubleshoot it.
If the problem is occurring in something not objectively knowable (like a human), then it is your job to ask Why (usually several times) before you troubleshoot.
After all, even if you’re an engineer, you can’t solve a problem if you don’t know why it exists.
* I’m married to an engineer, but that’s not the only reason I love them
