When I was a senior in college, I took a pottery class.
One of our assignments, before learning to throw on the wheel, was to create a functional piece using slabs of clay. I designed an Alice in Wonderland-inspired vase and built something that somewhat resembled the design.
Obviously impressed by my innate talent, the instructor offered to teach me a special glazing technique that used highly toxic chemicals to create…well…I stopped listening as soon as I heard “toxic chemicals.” It was dangerous, so I was in.
The result was a rather misshapen (not Alice in Wonderland-inspired) vase that looked like it was made out of chunks of rusted metal.
I loved it!
My roommate hated it.
She declared it the ugliest thing she ever saw and forbid me from placing it anywhere in the apartment where she might have the misfortune of laying eyes on it.
To this day, she swears it’s the ugliest thing she’s ever seen.
I display it proudly on the bookshelf in my office.
It would be easy to explain our different reactions to my work of art as simply the result of different aesthetic preferences. And while there may be some truth in it, I suspect the better explanation is the IKEA Effect.
The IKEA Effect
First identified and named in 2011 by professors from Harvard Business School, Yale, and Duke, the IKEA effect is a cognitive bias in which people place a disproportionately high value on products they partially create.
Think about it. We all have that piece of furniture, art, craft project, or home improvement effort that we assembled, designed, crafted, installed, or built that we absolutely love and refuse to part with.
No one understands why we won’t let go of that broken, worn out, dust collecting, out of style, money pit but, we believe, it’s simply because they don’t understand or see what we do and that, once they do, they too will see it for the treasure it is.
The same behavior happens in innovation. Teams invest months, even years, developing, testing, and launching new products and services, and yet, when the market doesn’t respond (i.e. there’s no demand, meaningful revenue, or potential profit), the product or service continues to be offered.
This is the IKEA Effect in action.
And the result is Zombies.
IKEA Effect Zombies
As evidence mounts that the project will not achieve market success, innovation teams invest with urgency, believing that more marketing, more sales calls, and more discounts will attract the customers that are surely out there. When the increased investment doesn’t produce the desired results, resources are slowly “reallocated,” the project is “deprioritized,” and a skeleton crew is left to make it work. The project is a Zombie, the living dead incarnation of an innovation project.
Given the commonality of this behavior, you might think it would be easy to spot Zombies. You would be wrong.
While the IKEA effect is believed to contribute to both the sunk cost effect and to “not invented here” syndrome, it is a far more fundamental effect, deeply rooted in people’s emotions and identity, and likely to manifest in “logical” arguments based on carefully selected data.
This makes spotting an IKEA Effect Zombie almost as hard as killing one.
Which is why it’s important to know your Zombies:
HiPPOPs – Highest Paid Person’s Opinion Projects (HiPPOPs) are envisioned, developed, and driven by a senior executive. When data counter to the executive’s opinion surfaces, the executive finds another piece of data to support their opinion. The project lurches on for years, fed by the executive, as people throughout the organization watch it slowly rot.
Perennial Pivoter – These projects are always just one pivot away from success. Created by a team of eternal optimists, there’s no such thing as failure, there’s only learning what not to do and what to try next.
Windfall Walker – When you hear “It’s a small investment and the upside could be huge,” a Walker is not far away. Often the brainchild of a single individual, the promise of these projects is far greater than their return. But they live on because everyone silently agrees that it’s easier to live with the Zombie than kill it.
Hope Hunter – Perhaps the most dangerous and cruel of all the Zombies, these projects always offer a glimmer of hope that the hockey stick of success is just a quarter, a customer, or a PR moment away. Convinced that staying the course and investing just one more dollar, month, or customer call will bring the project back to life.
How to Deal with IKEA Effect Zombies
Just like all other adventure stories, the source of the problem is also the solution. In this case, IKEA created the effect and their stores point to the solutions.
To Kill a Zombie, Stand Your Ground.
Zombies appear when you lose focus on creating and delivering something desirable (solves a customer’s problem), feasible (can be created), and attractive (meets or exceeds key strategic and financial targets).
Because Zombies are a sign that you’re lost, you need to do the same thing you do when you get lost in IKEA – stop, pull out the map, and re-orient yourself.
Go back to your original criteria for pursuing the project. Does the project still meet the thresholds or has something, like the company’s strategy or the project’s results, changed? How does the change impact the project’s desirability, feasibility, and attractiveness? What is the right thing to do for the business based on these changes?
Try to be objective as you re-orient yourself and avoid the urge to blame others or beat yourself up. What matters most isn’t how you got here, it’s where you go from here.
To Avoid Zombies:
Focus on the Meatballs. Let’s be honest, the best part of every IKEA trip is the meatballs (and lingonberry jam) in the café after you checkout. Every distraction and double-back in the Showroom delays the gratification of eating meatballs (and lingonberry jam).
When you start an innovation project, set a clear, objective, and measurable goal at the beginning. That’s your meatball. At every project milestone, revisit the goal. Is it still a desirable goal or has something in the business fundamentally shifted, requiring the goal to change? Is it still reasonable to believe that the project will achieve that goal, or have you learned something that makes the goal improbably or even impossible?
Staying focused on the goal and objectively evaluating your odds of achieving it makes it easier to let kill a project that can’t get you to where you need to go.
Follow the Arrows. IKEA Showroom maps are often as helpful as the assembly instructions that come with their furniture. Not at all. That’s why there are arrows on the floor and signs hanging from the ceiling to guide you through the shopping experience and, ultimately, to the meatballs.
A project process with clear governance is the innovation equivalent of floor arrows and ceiling signs. Before starting an innovation project, identify the activities required, thresholds that must be met for additional resources, roles and responsibilities of team members, and decision-making criteria.
As you do the work of innovation, you’ll refine the process and governance. By your third project, it should be 80% set and by your fifth, it should be 90% set (you never want it to be 100% because innovation does need a bit of flexibility).
Creating and following a standard process and objective governance model helps to remove the emotion that drives the IKEA effect and creates Zombies.
A Zombie and IKEA Effect Free Innovation Zone
By acknowledging the Innovation Effect in your organization, identifying and killing the Zombies it creates and putting the goals, processes, and governance in place to prevent a Zombie recurrence you’re on your way to more efficient, effective, and successful innovation efforts.
I recommend celebrating with meatballs (and lingonberry jam)!
Congratulations! You’ve taken action to make innovation happen. You created an innovation team, you gave them all the Design Thinking, Lean Innovation, and Disruptive Innovation books and articles, and you left them alone to make sure that they aren’t infected by the corporate antibodies that plague those working on the day-to-day business.
But nothing is happening.
Or maybe something is happening but it’s not what you need or want.
You are frustrated.
Your team is frustrated.
This is not going well and if the team doesn’t turn things around, you’re shutting it all down. After all, you have a business that needs your attention and management and if you don’t keep your eye on that ball, there won’t be a future for the business.
I understand. I’ve been there. Lots of leaders have been there.
And you’re right, something does need to change.
YOU need to change.
As a leader in an organization, there are 3 thing YOU must do in order to have a chance at innovation success.
YOU need to do these things because only you have the organizational authority, influence, and power to make these decisions and support and defend the actions required to deliver on them. Note that I use the word “chance.” Doing these 3 things is not a guarantee of success but, I promise you, NOT doing them does guarantee failure.
Talk about what Innovation will enable, not just why it’s important
Your innovation team knows that innovation is important, they desperately want to do it, and they’re working hard on it. But they need direction and the rest of the organization needs to know why the team is doing what it’s doing and why you’re giving them the resources.
Doing this requires that you go beyond explaining why innovation is important. We all know that innovation is essential to an organization’s long-term success. We also know that we should eat 5 servings of vegetables a day and floss twice daily. Knowing that something is important isn’t the same as doing something that is important.
Instead you need to set the vision for what things will look like in the future, after the innovation has taken hold. You need to show everyone how things will be better in the future because of the changes being made today. You need to give everyone something to believe in and work towards.
Tennant T15 Floor Scrubber Operator Training
Consider Tennant, maker of the small bluish-green Zamboni like machines you see cleaning floors in office buildings and airports. They were founded in 1870 as a supplier of hardwood floors and invented floor scrubbers in the 1930s. For over 120 years, they worked to fulfill their mission “to become the preeminent company in residential floor maintenance equipment, floor coatings, and related products” and they enjoyed a nice steady business as a result.
Then, in 1999, Janet Dolan was named CEO, becoming the first non-family member to run the company. As a long-time member of the Board, Ms. Dolan knew the company well and she also knew that it was facing increasing competition and price pressure. So, with the support of the Board and her executive team, a year after she took the reigns, Ms. Dolan announced a new mission for Tennant: “To bring to market sustainable cleaning innovations that empower others to create a cleaner, safer, healthier world.”
That’s a pretty big change from floor maintenance, coatings, and related products.
And way more inspiring.
So what happened?
Revenue decreased from 2000 to 2001. Then it plateaued from 2001 to 2002. So far not so good, right?
In 2002, Tennant launched 2 new products — one that cleaned floors with 70% less water and 90% less detergent but resulted in significantly lower labor costs, and a carpet cleaning scrubber that used less water and detergent but which decreased drying time from 18 hours to 30 minutes.
Neither of these innovation would have been possible under the old mission because it defined Tennant as a company that made (and sold) “floor coatings, and related products.” But both were spot-on with the new one mission, one that defined the company as an enabler of a “cleaner, safer, healthier world.”
The result? A steady upward climb in revenue from approximately $400M in 2002 to $701M in 2008
Yes, Tennant did many other things (restructuring, altering their manufacturing process and supply chain) during that time period that also contributed to their growth. But you can’t cut your way to a nearly 10% CAGR. You innovate your way there. And Tennant’s new mission made that possible.*
Quantify what Innovation must deliver
“Money talks, bullsh*t walks.”
– Some guy in my 12th grade French class (I have no idea why this was said in the context of a French class but I do remember it better than most of the French I learned).
Yes, innovation is fun. But innovation for the purpose of having fun is a hobby. You’re innovating because you need to grow your business. So treat innovation like a business and give it a target.
LEGO Shop: “Mind the Gap” from TripAdvisor
That target is known as the Growth Gap.
The Growth Gap is a concept which, as far as I can tell, was introduced in Robert B. Tucker’s 2002 bookDriving Growth Through Innovation: How leading firms are transforming their future and is one of the most important and simple innovation tools I’ve seen used.
In fact, you’ve probably already calculated your Growth Gap. You just do’t know it. Yet.
Start with your future revenue goal (you probably set this during your annual strategic planning process as the goal for 3–5 years from now). Now subtract your current revenue. Then, subtract the expected revenue of everything else in your pipeline. What’s left is your Growth Gap, aka the amount of revenue that innovation (i.e. stuff you don’t yet have funded or in the pipeline) needs to deliver.
NOTE: there are far more precise and complicated ways to calculate the Growth Gap but this was is quick and will get you to an answer that is more right than wrong.
Several years ago, I worked with a global athletic company that was already well known for its innovations but which was trying to become more systematic in their efforts and more diligent about investing in Breakthrough and Disruptive innovation. The team and its C-Suite sponsors knew that additional investment was required to fund Breakthrough and Disruptive innovation but senior leaders were hesitant to allocate the cash.
So we calculated the growth gap.**
At the time, the company had $25B in revenue and the stated goal of growing to $50B in revenue in 7 years. According to their strategic plan, they had line of sight to an additional $15B in net revenue (new revenue from new launches less revenue losses from declining and discontinued products) resulting in an estimated $40B revenue in 7 years. From there, the math is pretty easy $50B promised minus $40B predicted equals $10B Growth Gap.
This means that management had to believe that they could create and scale 2 new Facebooks (based on Facebook’s revenue at the time) in the next 7 years.
With the need for innovation quantified, the coffers opened and innovation investment, activity, and results sky-rocketed.
Get involved in the work
Yes, you have a lot on your plate. No, that does not give you the right to delegate innovation.
If you have set a vision for what the business looks like as a result of innovation and you’ve quantified what innovation needs to deliver for your business then your innovation team IS a business and you need to be involved
But you do have a lot on your plate.
And you’re probably already involved in innovation governance processes like sitting on an Innovation Council, reviewing learnings from innovation projects, making small investments to get to the next learning stage, asking different questions in innovation meetings than you do in your regular business review meetings, and celebrating “failures” instead of brushing them under the rug.
Good for you! (no really, I mean that).
But are you getting your hands dirty? Are you leaving the office to see innovation at work? Are you going into the market to talk to the people you want to serve?
How much of your time are you spending on innovation? If, like the executives in the above example, you expect 26% of your future revenue to come from innovation, are you spending 25% of your time with the innovation team? 10% (i.e. 4 hours per week or 2 days per month?) 2.5% (1 hour per week or a half-day a month)?
Spending time outside of meetings and inside the work of innovation can make all the difference. In one case, it made a nearly $1B+ difference
Liz Martin/ The Gazette
I started my career at P&G working on a product code-named DD-1.
In my first year at P&G, we launched DD-1 into test markets in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and Pittsfield, Massachusetts. And those test markets went extremely well. So well in fact, that we experienced product shortages and the emergence of a strange gray-market of DD-1 products.
At the same time, we were working with IRI to run DD-1 through a BASES test, a standard modeling exercise that sought to forecast initial and on-going revenue for new products and a standard step in the process for securing launch approval.
Since the test markets were going so well, we were confident that the BASES results would be equally strong and moved forward with putting together a launch recommendation for the new brand. We even scheduled a meeting with the CEO and COO to get their signatures on the launch approval document
Then the BASES results came back. And they were bad. Historically bad. Perhaps the worst results in the history of P&G.
But we were not deterred. We had the real-world results from our test markets and we confidently and optimistically plowed ahead.
DD-1’s leadership team presented the launch reco, including BASES results, to the CEO and COO. They explained that we did not believe that the BASES results were accurate because they used the re-purchase cycle of canned aerosol dusting sprays as an analog to the re-purchase cycle of DD-1 cloths and data from the test market (real world data! real usage data!) told a very different story. They asked for approval to launch.
The CEO said no.
The CEO believed the BASES results. BASES had always been accurate for all previous launches (keep in mind 99% of previous launches were incremental improvements to existing brands). The launch was cancelled.
Then, the COO spoke up. He believed the test market results and agreed that there was a flaw in the BASES methodology. He believed DD-1 should launch. He would take responsibility for its launch and its results.
The CEO acquiesced.
Swiffer was launched in 1999
Today, it is closing in on the coveted $1B Brand status.
Why, when presented with the same launch recommendation, did the CEO and COO make two different decisions? The COO spent a few hours one day in Cedar Rapids Iowa. He saw the test market results playing out live, he spoke to the people who drove from store to store to find refill cloths. He experienced the innovation instead of just reading about it.
So, my corporate executive friend, do not give up. Step up and lead (yes, even more than you have). Paint the picture of how innovation will shape your business’ future. Quantify what it must deliver so that you can make informed (and realistic) investment decisions. Get your hands dirty because even a few hours of working in innovation, alongside your team, can make all the difference.
When a business fails to innovate it is because executives fail to lead.
It is not because there is a lack of ideas
It is not because there aren’t enough resources
It is not because the market doesn’t support it.
It is because executives lack the courage to lead so they focus on being a “great” manager.
Now, before you get all upset about that truth bomb, let’s get clear on what two of the words used above — innovation and manager — mean
Innovation — Something different that creates value. Yes, it could be a new to the world widget. It could also be an improvement to an internal process. Trust me, employees have lots of ideas on how to improve things and many of those ideas require no resources. But they don’t speak up because they don’t see leaders, only managers.
Manager — Leaders set a vision and inspire people to follow them. Managers enforce the status quo and monitor and measure people’s performance. Leaders encourage debate, growth, and ambition. Managers demand compliance and repetition in pursuit of perfection. Leaders encourage curiosity and continuous improvement. Managers would rather live with a problem they understand than a solution they don’t. Organizations are filled with managers enjoying long and “successful” careers.
“Managers would rather live with a problem they understand than with a solution they don’t.” — John Bolton (my dad, not the ambassador)
One of the hazards of a career spent in innovation, as an intrapreneur and as a consultant, is that I’ve lost count of the number of innovation efforts I’ve been a part of. But I can tell you that none of the failures were due to a bad idea or a lack of resources or the absence of market opportunity. They were due to executives who didn’t have time to engage in and understand the process, who chose to allocate all resources to the core business, or who didn’t have the patience to invest in something now only to have their successor reap the rewards.
But I have worked with a few precious leaders who achieved great success.
Here’s what we can learn from the leaders.
Integrate leadership and innovation
One of my clients, the CHRO of a global pharma company, repeatedly points out, “every organization is perfectly designed to achieve the results it gets. If you don’t like the results, change the organization’s design.” Given that most organizations keep their innovation team separate from the group within HR that focuses on leadership development, we shouldn’t be surprised that true leadership is often absent in innovation.
“Every organization is perfectly designed to achieve the results it gets. If you don’t like the results, change the organization’s design.” — CHRO of a global pharma co.
We also shouldn’t be surprised that the CHRO mentioned above designed a “Leadership & Innovation” function within her company. She and her C-suite peers recognize that these two things are inextricably linked and thus they must organize to encourage and enable both. They’ve put top talent in place in the organization and brought in practitioners from other companies to encourage diverse thinking and approaches. And they’ve put innovation and leadership goals on everyone’s development plans because you don’t become a world-class innovator through wishes and words.
Immediately be of service
The most successful innovation organization that I’ve ever helped build started with a grand vision and a humble task list. The vision was to be a “moonshot factory” in which new business models could be created, incubated, and launched without fear of falling victim to the tyranny of the business’ daily demands. The humble task list for the first year was to assemble and monitor the company’s innovation portfolio — the IP, projects, and products in each silo that were drawing funds from the corporate innovation budget.
Portfolio management is not glamorous work and it’s even harder when it means shining a light on decisions and activities that have thrived in the dark. But the work immediately created value for the CEO, providing evidence that the company really was spending 95% of its innovation resources on incremental improvements and less than 5% on projects that would redefine the company and the industry.
With the CEO now endorsing the existence of the group, they had the license to expand their scope and start helping select innovation teams. Once they proved helpful to leaders of those teams, they could expand a bit more into establishing their own projects. Now, 7 years later, the organization team employs 200+ people and has launched or piloted nearly a dozen new businesses.
Help people break the right rules
I’m all for “ask forgiveness, not permission” but the fact is that some rules cannot and should not be broken. Some of the unbreakable rules are obvious, like laws and government regulations, but some aren’t. That’s where leaders come in.
When I was in brand management at P&G, leading the launch of Swiffer WetJet, I broke a lot of rules. I made sure to never surprise my boss and even asked for his input on which ones to break and how to break them.
Sometimes he would tell me how to break the rule, sometimes he would tell me to break it and he would cover me, and sometimes he would tell me that if I broke the rule I was on my own. He trusted me to never surprise him and to always make smart choices and I trusted him to have my back when he said he would.
You have a choice.
You can be a leader or you can be a manager.
Being a manger is safer and easier. You can have a very long and successful career just being a manager.
Being a leader can feel risky and difficult. But it’s the only way to to inspire and impact others and to drive the innovation and change that is so desperately needed.
I love stories. When I was a kid, my parents would literally give me a book and leave me places while they ran errands. They knew that, as long as I was reading, I wouldn’t be moved.
But there was one story I hated – The Emperor’s New Clothes
I hated it because it made absolutely no sense. It was a story of adults being stupid and a kid being smart, and, to a (reasonably) well-behaved kid, it was absolutely unbelievable.
No adult would try to sell something that doesn’t exist, like the clothiers did with the cloth. No adult would say they could see something they couldn’t, like the Emperor and the townspeople did. Adults, after all, don’t play at imagination.
As a kid, this story seemed completely wild and unrealistic.
As an adult, this story is so true that it hurts.
The truth of this story touches so many things and innovation is at the top of the list.
I’ve spent my career working in innovation working within large companies and as an advisor to them. I know what executives, like the emperor, request. I’ve said what the consultants say to sell their wares. I believed all of it.
Now I need to be the kid and point out some of the lies, as I see them.
Lie #1: Companies can disrupt themselves
Truth #1: Companies can but they won’t
There are lots of reasons why companies won’t and don’t disrupt themselves but, in my experience, there is one reason that trumps them all: It’s not in anyone’s interest.
In most companies, there is not one single person, including the CEO, who has a vested interest (i.e. is incentivized) in taking the time and allocating the resources required to disrupt the current busines.
In most companies, however, there are lots of people who have a vested interest (i.e. make lots of money) in delivering on quarterly or annual KPIs.
Disruption takes time. It took more than 20 years for the hard disk drive industry, the focus of Clayton Christensen’s doctoral research and the basis of the theory of Disruptive Innovation, to be disrupted. Even in today’s faster-paced world, it’s hard to find an industry that, in a span of 5-10 years, ceased to exist as a result of disruptive innovation.
Companies have the resources to disrupt themselves. But executives don’t have the incentive.
Lie #2: If companies act like VCs, they’ll successfully innovate
Truth #2: If companies act like VCs, they’ll go bankrupt
OK, this one is more false than true.
Companies need to engage in multiple types of innovation:
Improving their core
Moving into adjacent markets by serving new customers or offering something new or making money in new ways or using new process, resources, and activities
Creating something breakthrough that changes the basis of competition
Companies should only “act like VCs” when dealing with breakthrough innovations.
VCs are purpose-built to be financially successful in environments where there are more unknowns than knowns. This is why the central tenant of acting like a VC is adopting a portfolio approach and making little bets in lots of companies. When large companies who take this approach to breakthrough innovations, they, like VCs, invest in lots of initiatives thus increasing the odds of investing in a winner.
However, companies that “act like VCs” when it comes to their entire innovation portfolio simply dilute their resources, investing too little in too many things and ultimately decreasing their already low odds of innovation success.
This is because when engaging in core and adjacent innovation, the bulk of innovation pursued by large companies, the knowns typically equal or outweigh the unknowns. As a result, it makes more sense to NOT act like a VC and make medium to large bets in a few initiatives, enabling companies to rapidly launch and scale their core and adjacent innovation initiatives.
Lie #3: We can pivot our way to success
Truth #3: If you’re not solving a problem, no amount of pivoting will bring success
The fact that the emperor and all the townspeople believed the emperor was wearing clothes didn’t make it true.
And no amount of “pivoting” – it’s not silk, it’s wool! It’s not green, it’s blue! – was going to make it true.
The same can be said for innovation.
If the innovation isn’t solving a problem, there is no market. Shifting from a product to a service, won’t change that. Nor will changing from a transaction-based model to a subscription model.
Pivoting is how you fit a square peg into a round hole. It’s not how you create a hole for your square peg.
Of course, it’s easy to come up with one, or two, or maybe even three examples of the lie being true. It is those one, or two, or even three examples that are trotted out in every speech, book, article, and consulting pitch to convince us to believe. But the reality is that the exceptions, in this case, prove the rule.
After all, the emperor wasn’t completely naked. He was wearing a crown.
But that doesn’t make the lack of clothes any less embarrassing.
“When you say, ‘uh-huh’ over and over like that, I can tell you’re not listening to me.”
Me, age 7, to my mom
It doesn’t take a lot of experience to know when someone isn’t listening. From a young age, we can tell when someone is listening and when they’re simply responding.
When we’re with the person, we notice the lack of eye contact or the blankness in their eyes showing us where their thoughts are actually at. When we’re on the phone, we hear the repetitive and monotone mumbles that tell us they’re attention is elsewhere.
Yet often, what we want most is simply to be listened to.
This is true in our personal relationships and in our relationships with the businesses and organizations we support. We want people and businesses to listen to our opinions, to understand them, and to thoughtfully respond to them.
Instead, people and businesses simply “hear” us.
There’s a big difference between listening and hearing
According to the Oxford University Press, hearing is “the faculty of perceiving sounds” while listening is “give one’s attention to a sound” and “take notice of and act on what someone says.”
As I explain to my clients, surveys, focus groups, and even in-depth qualitative research is often a Hearing exercise – the company develops a list of questions, asks their customers to answer the questions, then tabulates the answers and passes them along to whoever needs them.
This is a transaction. An exchange of information. It is not listening.
Listening requires engagement. It happens during EPIC conversations, those typified by empathy, perspective, insights, and connection.
Listening accelerates innovation and drives transformation. When we’re listening, we’re learning new information and discovering new insights, which enables companies to create and act differently, differentiating themselves from the competition and ultimately gaining an advantage.
Listening takes practice but here are 5 simple steps to help you get started:
Drop the agenda – Before you have a conversation within someone, identify the 1-3 things you need to learn and leave space for at least 1 surprise. If you go into a conversation with an agenda or a long list of questions, you’re only going to hear what you want to hear because your mind is primed to seek confirmation for your opinions and to reject anything counter to what you’re hoping to hear.
Follow where they lead – During the conversation, don’t worry about trying to steer the conversation or “keep things on track.” If you only need to learn 3 things in the conversation and you have 30 minutes or an hour, you have plenty of time for tangents, stories, and random connections. This is where the surprises and the insights come from.
Ask Why – Channel your inner two-year-old (or Toyota Production employee) and ask “Why” multiple times. When you ask “Why” you get personal, surprising answers that point to the motivations behind people’s choices and actions. When you ask “What” you get rational, expected, even obvious answers that you, and your competitors, have heard before.
Say as little as possible – Follow the 80/20 rule and spend 80% of your time listening. When you ask a question, don’t go into a long pre-amble about why you’re asking it or follow it with a long list of options or examples. Simply ask the question and the answer will come.
Let the silence work for you – After you ask a question, start counting silently in your head. Before you get to 8, the person you’re listening to will start talking. Silence makes people uncomfortable but it’s also when the brain goes into exploration and discovery mode. And the longer the silence goes on, the faster the brain works to come up with something to fill it. So, stay quiet and let the brain work!
Whether you’re talking to a customer, a colleague, or a friend, you’re talking to someone who wants you to listen, to hear and understand what they are saying. These 5 tips will help you do that and, if done well, discover something wonderful and unexpected with the power to transform.
Originally published on April 20, 2020 on Forbes.com
