by Robyn Bolton | Apr 13, 2022 | Innovation, Leadership
Do you remember the 2010s? The US economy was in its most prolonged ever period of expansion. Unemployment was at a 50-year low, and there were 110 months of uninterrupted job gains.
Everyone talked about innovation.
Entrepreneurs worked at it, and their startups became unicorns while they became celebrities.
The big companies, the companies with capital, scale, and resources far exceeding that of any startup or even a unicorn, only played with it.
Sure, they hosted hackathons and shark tanks, spun up innovation teams and corporate venture capital arms, and took field trips to Silicon Valley and Burning Man. But what do they have to show for it? What market (re)defining value came from all that activity?
Nothing.
Because it’s nearly impossible to change when you have no immediate need to change.
Too often, success stifles innovation.
But leaders can change that.
Keep innovation on your RADAR
As a manager, you need to deliver today’s business by keeping costs down and revenue up.
As a leader, you want to establish a legacy of long-term success that fuels the business and inspires your people long after you’ve moved to your next role.
The key to achieving both is through the daily practice of innovation. While many leadership behaviors create a culture of innovation and drive business results, I’ve found that RADAR is a handy acronym for some of the key practices of top leaders.
Redefine Innovation
Innovation is something new that creates value. Most people interpret this to mean that innovation is a new to the world product that makes billions in revenue. And while that may be true, it’s much too myopic.
“Something” could be anything from a product to a process, service, revenue model, or delivery model. “New” could be new to the world or your industry, company, function, or team. “Value” could be more revenue or lower costs, higher profits, a better/faster/cheaper/easier experience, or even greater customer or employee satisfaction.
By expanding the definition of innovation, you invite more people into its practice and create more opportunities for innovation to thrive.
Ask Questions
As a leader, it’s natural to feel like you need to have the answers. And sometimes, you do. But often, it’s more vital for you to ask the right questions.
By asking questions, you’re teaching your people to think and take ownership of their work. You’re also demonstrating that you trust them because they are closer to the work than you are. If all you give are answers, you won’t get any wiser, and neither will your team. If you ask questions, everyone, including you, will get smarter and make better decisions.
Discuss Options
When faced with a problem, it’s tempting to jump right to a solution. But if you jump too soon, you could jump to the wrong solution or create an even bigger problem.
Instead, fall in love with the problem. Explore it, question it, embrace it, amplify it, turn it inside out, take it to the extreme. Then, once you’ve embraced the mess that is the problem, play with possible solutions – how would a different industry solve the problem, what if you focused on solving only one key aspect, how could you make it worse?
Yes, this will be uncomfortable (which is why it’s ok to timebox the exercise), but it will also push your team’s thinking and uncover options you never knew existed.
Act Imperfectly
Some lessons can only be learned through experience. As a kid, you know the burner on the stove is hot, but you don’t fully understand how hot it is until you put your hand on it (and then you never forget)
Imperfect action is always a better teacher than perfect inaction. Yes, you need to do the research and conduct the analysis, but eventually, there comes the point when doing is a better way to learn.
Reflect on Lessons Learned
You build knowledge through instruction and skills through experience, but you don’t lock those things in and convert them into habits until you reflect on what you heard and did.
Set your team up to learn at the start of a project by asking what they expect will happen and why, what they’ll do if they’re right, and what they’ll do if they’re wrong. No judgment, no keeping score, just an exercise to prime you and your team for learning
At the end, reflect on the journey. Ask what went right, what went wrong, what went as expected, what didn’t, what we would do differently, and what will we change. Record the answers without judgment and create a plan to put them into action on the next project
How will you keep innovation on your RADAR?
Building innovation habits is key to ensuring that success doesn’t stifle innovation. Daily habits like those in RADAR will make amplifying and unleashing innovation easier.
I’d love to hear what other innovation habits you practice. How do you keep innovation on your RADAR?
by Robyn Bolton | Apr 5, 2022 | Innovation, Stories & Examples
“That’s not how we do it here.”
Very few phrases induce more eye-rolls or are more effective in shutting down change than that.
But how can you argue when “how we do it here” works (for now), is what everyone knows, and is “consistent with our culture?”
You go Bananas!
In March, my husband and I traveled to Savannah to watch the Savannah Bananas play their cross-town rival, the Party Animals.
Over a year ago, I became obsessed with the Bananas, a collegiate summer team, and their unique brand of baseball known as Banana Ball. The rules are as follows:
- Every inning counts: The team that scores the most runs in an inning gets 1 point, and the team with the most points at the end of the game wins.
- Two-hour time limit: If the game is tied at the end of nine innings or 2 hours, then there is a…
- 1:1 Showdown Tiebreaker: In the event of a tie, 3 players are on the field (pitcher, catcher, fielder) and 1 batter who has to hit a home run or, well, it gets complicated and chaotic, so click here to get the details
- No stepping out of the batter’s box
- No mound visits
- No bunting
- No walks: If a 4th ball is thrown, the batter takes off running, and every defensive player must touch the ball before it becomes live and a play can be made
- Batters can steal first (I have been advocating for this since 1995, no joke, ask my dad)
- If a fan catches a foul ball, it’s an out
Lest you think I’m the only crazy person who would travel for this spectacle, there were people from 24 different states at the game. The Bananas have led their league in attendance since 2016 and set a record in 2018 with 118,262 fans over 25 games.
Lest you think the Bananas are the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball, they won the Coastal Plain League in 2016 and 2021, and 8 Bananas were drafted in 2021.
So yeah, they’re good, too.
It started with “What if”
Despite record attendance and a championship in their first season, the Bananas’ owner, Jesse Cole, wasn’t satisfied. Even though they created a fans first experience, people were still leaving before the game ended.
You can read the full story of how Banana Ball was born, but here’s the gist:
- Jesse’s dad said, “What if every inning was match play and whoever won the inning got a point?”
- Jesse, the front office team, and the head coach brainstormed a handful of rule changes to “highlight the more exciting parts of baseball while also countering the slower aspects of the game that tend to bore your average fan.”
- Jesse called his college baseball coach, then the head coach at Lander University, and asked if they could play a game with the new rules as an experiment. The answer, “Why not?”
- It worked! The players loved it. The coaches loved it. Even the players’ girlfriends, who usually sat in the stands in did their homework, watched every minute.
- They kept experimenting. Over 1.5 years (from 2018 to 2020), the Bananas kept tweaking the rules, adding new ones and removing ones that didn’t contribute to the goal of more excitement and a better fan experience.
What’s your Banana Ball?
Why am I telling you all this (besides the fact that I am obsessed)?
Because if a collegiate summer league team with a silly name can up-end (even in a small way) an institution as stodgy as baseball and convert its grumpiest purists, you can too!
Follow the playbook:
- Don’t ever be satisfied: Things can always be better. It’s great to start with a sell-out, but if people don’t stick around, there’s an opportunity to improve.
- Define your Why. What is your version of “highlight the more exciting parts of baseball while also countering the slower aspects of the game that tend to bore your average fan.”
- Ask What if. Use analogies like Jesse’s dad did when he transplanted golf’s match play to baseball.
- Run small experiments with friendly people. The Bananas didn’t play Banana Ball rules in the first game after drafting the rules. They called a friend and ran an experiment.
- Gather all the data. The Bananas knew that the payers had to enjoy playing by Banana rules for them to stick, so they asked for feedback. They also realized that the girlfriends’ behavior change was data, even if it’s not the data the experiment was designed to collect.
- Keep experimenting. One success is just that. You need a second, a third, and a whole bunch more before being confident it will last.
- Have fun. Baseball is a business, but it’s also a game. Your job can be both, too.
by Robyn Bolton | Mar 29, 2022 | Innovation, Leadership, Metrics, Strategy
“We need to be more innovative.”
How many times have you said or heard that? It’s how most innovation efforts start. It’s a statement that reflects leaders’ genuine desire to return to the “good ol’ days” when the company routinely created and launched new products and enjoyed the publicity and growth that followed.
But what does it mean to “be more innovative?”
Innovation’s ABCs
A is for Architecture
Architecture includes most of the elements people think of when they start the work to become more innovative – strategy, structure, processes, metrics, governance, and incentives.
Each of these elements answers fundamental questions:
- Strategy: Why is innovation important? How does it contribute to our overall strategy?
- Structure: Who does the work of innovation?
- Process: How is the work done?
- Metrics: How will we know when we’re successful? How will we measure progress?
- Governance: Who makes decisions? How and when are decisions made?
- Incentives: Why should people invest their time, money, and political capital? How will they be rewarded?
When it comes to your business, you can answer all these questions. The same is true if you’re serious about innovation. If you can’t answer the questions, you have work to do. If you don’t want to do the work, then you don’t want to be innovative. You want to look innovative*.
B is for Behavior
Innovation isn’t an idea problem. It’s a leadership problem.
Leaders that talk about innovation, delegate it to subordinates and routinely pull resources from innovation to “shore up” current operations don’t want to be innovative. They want to look innovative.
Leaders who roll up their sleeves and work alongside innovation teams, ask questions and listen with open minds, and invest and protect innovation resources want to be innovative.
To be fair, it’s incredibly challenging to be a great leader of both innovation and operations. It’s the equivalent of writing equally well with your right and left hands. But it is possible. More importantly, it’s essential.
C is for Culture
Culture is invisible, pervasive, and personal. It is also the make-or-break factor for innovation because it surrounds innovation architecture, teams, and leaders.
Culture can expand to encourage and support exploration, creativity, and risk-taking. Or it can constrict, unleashing antibodies that swarm, suffocate, and kill anything that threatens the status quo.
Trying to control or change culture is like trying to hold water in your fist. But if you let go just a bit, create the right conditions, and wait patiently, change is possible.
Easy as 123
The most common mistake executives make in the pursuit of being “more innovative” is that they focus on only A or only B or only C. But, as I always tell my clients, the answer is “and, not or.”
- Start with Architecture because it’s logical, rational, and produces tangible outputs like org charts, process flows, and instruction manuals filled with templates and tools. Architecture is comforting because it helps us know what to do and how.
- Use Architecture to encourage Behavior because the best way to learn something is to do it. With Architecture in place (but well before it’s finished), bring leaders into the work – talking to customers, sharing their ideas, and creating prototypes. When leaders do the work of innovation, they quickly realize what’s possible (and what’s not) and are open to learning how to engage (behave) in a way that supports innovation.
- Leverage Architecture and Behavior to engage Culture by creating the artifacts, rituals, and evidence that innovation can happen in your company, is happening and will continue to happen. As people see “innovation” evolve from a buzzword to a small investment to “the way we do business,” their skepticism will fade, and their support will grow.
Just like the Jackson 5 said
ABC, It’s easy a 123
Architecture, behavior, culture – they’re all essential to enabling an innovation capability that repeatedly creates new revenue.
And while starting with architecture, building new leadership behaviors, and investing until the culture changes isn’t easy, it’s the 123 steps required to “be more innovative.”
by Robyn Bolton | Mar 23, 2022 | Customer Centricity, Innovation, Stories & Examples
“He’s just not that into you.”
That sentence is usually uttered as tough-love advice to a friend who can’t seem to let go of a guy that’s clearly let go of her. A few weeks ago, it was tough love advice to one of my friends who couldn’t understand why customers weren’t swooning over his company’s newest product.
They didn’t hate.
But most didn’t like it enough to buy it.
It wasn’t rejection that was killing the business. It was apathy.
It was painful to witness.
It is also solvable.
Breeding apathy
I’m a baseball fan. I’m also the first to admit that baseball breeds apathy amongst its fans.
4-hour games. At-bats that feel like 4 hours. Fan involvement that is limited mainly to the Wave and the 7th Inning Stretch. It’s boring.
Unless you’re in Savannah, GA.
If you’re in Savannah to see baseball, you show up 2 hours before the game starts. When the gates open, you rush to your seats because you don’t want to miss a moment of the pre-game festivities. During the game, you bounce in and out of your seat so much that it counts as a workout. After the game, you spend another hour dancing and singing with the band and the team. By the time you get home, your voice is hoarse, your head is spinning, and you swear you never knew a baseball game could be so fun.
It’s bananas. The Savannah Bananas.
Converting the apathetic into raving fans
How do they do it?
How does a collegiate summer baseball team sell out every game since 2016 and routinely attract people from around the world?
More importantly, what can you (and my friend) learn from them?
1. Do Your (customers’) Job (to be Done).
Most people go to baseball games to have fun and make memories. Most MLB franchises are focused on making a profit and winning trophies. Not a whole lot of overlap there.
The Bananas promise “to provide an electric atmosphere at all of our games! Our fans come first, and we’re dedicated to entertaining you!” There’s a complete overlap between what the fans want – have fun and make memories – and what the Bananas offer.
2. Deliver an end-to-end experience
For most businesses, designing and delivering an end-to-end experience is about investing in technology to make buying their products “frictionless” and training customer service to be more “helpful.”
The Bananas invest in delivering delight. Here’s what happened after I spent a whopping $50 to buy two tickets:
- I received an email telling me I had just made the “best decision of my life” and sharing a video of the “live” view of their offices when my order came in (dancing and chaos)
- Three days later, Carson called to thank me for buying tickets
- Two weeks before the game, they emailed to help me “mentally prepare” for the experience.
- One week before the game, they sent a permission slip to give to my boss to get out of work early.
- On gameday, they emailed a Spotify playlist so we could prepare for the game
- The day after, they emailed a handwritten thank you note from the owners
- A week after the game, they emailed a video montage of the game we attended
3. Be human
Most companies “run lean” and use technology to improve efficiencies because humans are expensive.
The Bananas are human. Carson emailed the permission slip. She also called to thank me for buying tickets. Nick sent the gameday email. He also gave me the wristband required to get to our seats. The owner, Jesse Cole, spent the night running around in a yellow tuxedo hyping up the crowd. His wife wrote a thank you letter.
4. Give thanks. No strings attached
We’ve all received the “Thank You for Your Purchase” email after an online transaction. We also know that the email will ask for something more – track your package, write a review, post on social media, buy another product.
The Bananas say, “Thank You,” then give you something more – a funny video, a permission slip, a Spotify playlist, a handwritten thank you note. They don’t ask you to buy merchandise or post about your experience on social media, or leave them a review.
5. Care
If you don’t care about your product, no one else will.
In a world of baseballs, be a banana.
There are dozens of other things the Savannah Bananas do that make them unique and delightful that your business (and MLB) would struggle to copy.
But there are at least five things you can copy to stave off customer apathy and inspire die-hard, life-long, “tell all your friends” loyalty.
What did I miss? What have YOU experienced or done to be a banana?
by Robyn Bolton | Mar 16, 2022 | Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
Imagine that you decided to temporarily shut down your business. You made this decision because you knew something major could go wrong and, despite some efforts, you didn’t make as much progress as you hoped. So, you temporarily closed without knowing how long “temporarily” would be.
Three months later, you have made big changes. Massive, ginormous, monumental changes. Changes to foundational elements of your business. You discontinued a beloved product, made existing products safer and expanded a controversial product.
Now, imagine that the press followed all of this. They reported on every meeting, speculated on every discussion, and critiqued every statement. They even said you should be fired.
But now, today, you announced that you’re open for business. All the problems are solved, and all the changes rolled out. The press celebrated, and articles, podcasts, and news stories heralded your business’ re-opening.
Your customers yawned.
They didn’t miss you.
Many didn’t even know you were gone.
A True Story
You just read the story of Major League Baseball at the end of its 99-day lockout.
But it could also be the story of your business if you make the same mistake MLB did in December, which is the same mistake it has made for the past 20+ years.
It forgot what business it’s in.
MLB thinks it’s in the baseball business. For some customers, diehard fans, it is. But for most, baseball is in the business of helping customers to:
- Make memories
- Have fun
- Feel connected to others
- Be entertained
- Drink beer and eat junk food without guilt
These are the Jobs to be Done that customers hire baseball to do for them. But there are dozens of other businesses offering to do the same Jobs, many in ways that are lower cost and more easily accessible. And fans are taking their business to those competitors.
According to Statista, the average per game attendance was 18,900 in 2021, a 34% decline from 2019. Even more troubling than this “generational low” is that people aren’t even watching baseball at home, evidenced by the 12% decline in TV viewership for games.
Customers are rejecting baseball. They just don’t care about it as much as they used to. As a result, they’re spending less time and less money on it and finding newer and better alternatives.
3 Questions to Figure Out if You’re Out (or In)
This story isn’t unique to MLB. It’s the story at the core of many failed businesses. The outward view of solving customers’ problems gives way to an increasingly inward-facing view of the business the business is in.
The story isn’t fast-paced or obvious, either. The declines happen slowly – average gameday attendance dropped only 367 people annually from 2012 to 2019, a decrease that’s easy to miss when considering that the average MLB ballpark holds 43,000 people.
But once the decline starts and apathy sets in, it is challenging to change the story. But not impossible.
If you want customers to care about you again, to need you and your products the way they used to, you need to care more about your customers than your business. You need to ask three questions:
1. “Why do you choose us?” (in Innovation-speak this translates to, “What are your Jobs to be Done?”)
2. “When you don’t choose us, who do you choose and why?”
Then you must listen. Really listen. To EVERYTHING customers say. The reasons you want to hear and the ones you don’t, The competitors you know and the ones you least expect. The things that make them better that you know and the ones you don’t agree with.
Then, and only then, do you look inward at your operations and business model and ask.
3. “What business are we in?”
Are your operations set up to deliver delight to customers or maximum efficiency to your business? Is your business model set up to create value for customers or maximize profit for you? Are you increasing the size of bases 3 inches and claiming its safer or doing everything possible to reduce the game’s length and increase its fun factor?
It’s not customer rejection that kills a business. It’s customer apathy.
Don’t allow your customers to become apathetic. They cared about your business once. Keep giving them reasons to care by asking what they care about and delivering it.
How do you make sure that you’re in the right business?
by Robyn Bolton | Mar 8, 2022 | Innovation, Leadership
When you were a child, you knew that the best stories began with “Once Upon a Time” and end with “And they lived happily ever after.” As an adult, you know that stories can begin and end any number of ways.
As a leader trying to grow a business, it may seem like all your innovation stories end with “And then we cancelled the project/disbanded the team/got distracted by the needs of our current business”
Why is that?
How can you change your innovation story the endings to “And they lived happily ever after (because they launched lots of cool new stuff that people loved and paid for and that led to new revenue and lots of growth and happy employees and other wonderful happy things)”
While there are hundreds, if not thousands, of answers to those questions, one of them is in the way you start the story.
How the story begins
Think about the last time you kicked off an innovation project. What did you say?
Story 1: “We need you to work on X and we don’t want you to be encumbered by what we’ve done in the past. We want you to explore, think creatively, and really push our thinking.
Story 2: “We need you to work on X and, to save you time, here is everything we did in the past. Use this as a starting point and build from here.
Story 3: We need you to work on X. Here’s what we did in the past, but we’re not tied to it. Look it over and let me know what you think we should do from here.
There’s nothing obviously wrong with any of these.
Just like “Once upon a time,” they start with clear direction – we need you to work on X. Even better, they all express your positive intentions and support (push our thinking, save you time, let me know what you think) for the team.
What could possibly go wrong?
How the story ends
The team returns from their quest, which usually involves a lot of research, to present their findings and recommendations. They are excited by what they discovered and eager to continue their work. They conclude their presentation and turn to you, eagerly awaiting your response.
If you started with #1
Thinking of all the freedom you gave at kickoff, and sigh. “That’s good work but we already knew most of that. We wanted you to push our thinking, but I don’t see a lot of new here.”
The team nods and tries to point out the new insights but to no avail. The gather their things and walk out. At best they feel dejected, like they failed an important test. At worst, they’re angry, feeling like the whole exercise was a trap. They know you’re disappointed and, as a result, the end is near.
If you started with #2
Thinking back to the dozens of files you gave them at kick-off, you lean forward and say, “That’s good work but we already knew most of that. To be fair, you built on what we had but why did it take so long?”
The team looks at each other, trying to hide their confusion. They built on what you gave them and delivered it on time. Not knowing quite what to say, they gather their things and walk out. Frustrated, they feel like they were set up to fail. After all, why would you give them so much time if you didn’t want them to use it? They know you’re frustrated too and brace themselves for the repercussions.
If you started with #3
You think back not to the kickoff but to the meeting after that, the one where the team presented their research plan. You take a deep breath and say, “That’s good work but we already knew most of that. To be fair, you did warn me that might be the case. I can see where some things shifted and where we gained new insights.”
The team nods and lays out the implications of their findings. They layout the milestones between today and a potential launch, and detail next steps to hit the next milestone. As before, you debate the insights and the plan, ultimately coming to agreement on what happens next. The team gathers their things and leaves the room, motivated to continue their work
What went wrong?
Three stories began but only 1 is on track for a “happily ever after.” The first two stories began with such promise, but they ended with dejection, anger, disappointment, confusion, and frustration. Why?
Unrealistic expectations
If you started with #1, you set unrealistic expectations. As a leader in the organization, you know more about the business than the team so it’s not realistic to expect the team to tell you something you don’t know. As someone with years of experience in the industry, you know that things don’t change overnight so even research that’s a few years old is still probably more right than wrong. Expecting the team to “push your thinking” and tell you something you don’t know isn’t realistic. Worse, it’s not fair.
Orders, not ownership
If you started with #2, you made it very clear from the start that you’re the expert by telling the team to take past work as a given and build on it rather than question it. You probably also gave them a timeline and told them to come back to you at the next milestone. You did all this to help the team work efficiently and you wanted them to feel ownership, to question the work and take the time they need, even if it’s less than the time given. But the team did exactly what you asked because you gave them orders and, in most companies, success comes from following orders.
What went right?
What did you do in #3 that put the team on path to “happily ever after?”
You were honest and transparent about past work. By sharing past work, you made it clear that you trusted the team to think critically and creatively, to analyze past data and make decisions about what should be kept, questioned, and discarded.
You invited the team to challenge you. When you shared the past work, you gave the team insight into your current hypotheses and biases. By admitting that you’re not tied to past work, you made it clear to the team that you were open to discussion and willing to change your mind.
You empowered the team to take ownership. By asking the team to review past work then come back to you with suggestions and plan, you gave them ownership of the process. When they left that first meeting, they were responsible for the work AND how the work got down. They were project owners now
The End (almost)
Good intentions aren’t enough to set innovation projects and teams up for success. How you start the story by setting expectations and empowering the team has a huge impact on how the story progresses and whether or not it ends “happily ever after.”
How do you start your stories?
