One great aspect of speaking at a TED event is that your talk is less than 20 minutes, which means you can watch all of the other speakers. I had the honor of speaking in Budapest, and every talk and performance gave me something to think about. Fantastic trip – thank you organizers!
So, to my talk…
First, if you haven’t read about “knowledge worker” motivators, then I suggest you check out this 11 minute animated clip from Dan Pink. It’s a good primer. I build on this material and the animation is great – my 4-year old was so captivated he watched the whole thing. You can also catch his TED video here.
Why watch my talk? There is a blind spot problem at the core of business innovation efforts, and the implications to companies, individuals, and societies are as big as it gets. While there is no blame or shame, it’s time to transform the innovation game. We’re all responsible, lets get to it…
Let me know what you think - are you seeing this struggle in your work place? (Click the picture for the link.)
I plan to unpack some of the ideas I shared in Budapest over the next few weeks. Let me know what’s interesting to you. (And read from the bottom up if you’re curious about the Zombie – Visionary war, and how this blog came to be.)
Hypothesis Test #2 – From Funnel Vision to the “People Thing”
In this presentation I was fortunate to have around 30 innovation leaders from large companies, mostly from Europe and some from the US. My objective was to get feedback on a methodology for how to put an innovation team into place. I basically came with the answers they asked me for at the Innovation Roundtable session.
At the end of the presentation I asked four questions:
- Is this topic important to your firm?
- Is your firm strong in this area?
- Would you like more information?
- Are you tired of the word “innovation”?
Here are the results:
I was shocked by these results. Of all audiences, I expected this one to be on top of this issue. Not the case. When it came to the people part of innovation they articulated a huge need, no competence, and a desire for more information. The last question was meant to be a little comedic relief, but I was also surprised that they weren’t suffering from innovation fatigue.
Hypothesis Test – Part I
As an innovation practitioner I had a single-minded focus – how do I actually deliver innovative solutions more quickly and consistently than the competition? And following, how do I turn thought leadership into practice leadership? How do I use this stuff? I looked to the service providers were offering and I found a lot of talk about the PROCESS, also known as the Innovation Funnel.
I started calling it “Funnel Vision”. I wanted to check if other innovation leaders saw the same preoccupation, so I did a half-day World Cafe session at the Innovation Roundtable in Copenhagen Denmark. Below is the Booz-1000-How-the-Top-Innovators-Keep-Winning. They talk about “capabilities” but in the end it’s stage gate tasks. Just turn a funnel up on end and tick the boxes in your process. Then you can be successful too! Good luck with that approach.
Here’s what we did: (see slide deck InnovationRoundtable-NOV11-2010)
- I have a funnel…and so does everyone else – no competitive advantage there.
- Funnel Vision leaves one with a false sense of security because now there’s a comforting stage gate with tick boxes, akin to Project Management. The assumption is that IF I use rigorous process tools, THEN I will deliver on time, spec, and budget. But everyone knows about the huge failure rate of major project initiatives, so that security is as deep as the paper it’s printed on. Who cares? It seemed like the process was the focus of what was required to deliver innovation successfully, and I didn’t believe it.
- So what is the competitive advantage? How about the teams who do the work? We dove into a World Cafe exploration of eight themes, all looking at the people behind the work.
What were the conclusions? They felt the same way that I did – the people piece matters, a lot, but no one knew of any service providers who could help us get this into place for an innovation group. They told me to come back with some answers, which seemed reasonable, so I went to work.
To understand this struggle better, I dove into the innovation research. I found something interesting.
Researchers wanted to identify the secret sauce of sustained corporate success. They used 10 years as the time horizon and stock value as the metric of success. What they found was pretty cool. First, what percent of firms are able to delivery above average shareholder returns over that 10 years? Any ideas? Only 10% deliver above average over 10 years – this is tough. Second, what were the two things that top 10% did better than everyone else? They managed their costs, and organically grew (that’s organic growth, not acquired growth, and innovation is the engine behind that growth).
What’s the insight? I stared at this for a while, and then considered a resource view of corporate activities.
On the left you have your core business – your bread and butter, and on the far right you have disruptive solutions or new business models. The middle is a bit of both. Can you see the differences?
When I’m “managing costs” I use linear thinking with tools from engineering and finance to reduce variance and eliminate waste for today.
When I’m pursuing “organic growth” I use divergent thinking with tools from creative problem solving and scenario planning to generate and explore new ideas for tomorrow.
So what’s the point? The secret sauce of sustained success is to get the best out of BOTH of these cultures, of reductive and generative thinking, not just one or the other. Fitzgerald wrote that the “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” As it turns out, this is also the measure of corporate intelligence – firms are really struggling with this. We have an achievement gap.
“Public corporations are a battlefield for the war between zombies and visionaries, and how it ends…I don’t know.”
Brian was sharing a story of yet another failed “skunk works” effort: small and talented team sitting away from HQ, mandate is to produce radical new concepts, team pitches up ideas to corporate, ideas get killed, innovation exec’s get frustrated and leave, remaining team gets pulled back to corporate campus. Invested resources produce very little benefit. Some frustrated staffers leave and those who stay become bitter critics of “those who don’t get it.” This is a classic story for those who work with dedicated innovation efforts, but my friend’s closing statement sent a small bomb into my brain and short circuited my thinking. His conclusion left me speechless for a two reasons: (1) the Zombie-Visionary War seemed true, and (2) I knew it couldn’t be true.
It seemed true because I had heard it before…over and over and over again. As I scanned countless conversations I’d had with other innovation leaders, I realized this Zombie-Visionary narrative synthesized the collective angst of a large percentage of corporate staffers who work on emerging business opportunities. (I proved this, in my own small way, but more on that later.) They were in a battle – they fought for resources, they fought for the innovation ideology, and they fought for a way of doing things. “Why is it like that?” The polite answers were predictable: incentives, inappropriate financial metrics, short term thinking driven by market quarterly expectations, etc.. But the more divisive answers were telling: “bean counter” mentality, autocratic leadership, automatons with no creativity, bureaucracy, ignorance, etc.. “They just don’t get it.” Innovation leaders, in short, believe they are struggling against a corporate culture that is hostile to very growth mandate they are charged with. And they’re right about that.
I knew it couldn’t be true because I worked in a corporate finance function and no one ever tried to eat my brains for lunch. In fact, when I thought about it, the most productive projects I worked on had a diverse mix of skill sets, including the finance and engineering people. I left those projects knowing that I was able to contribute much more when I was balanced with the skills attributed to the Zombie camp, the enemy camp. I knew the Zombie-Visionary war couldn’t be true because I had experienced how effective those camps can be when they work together for a shared purpose.
But my synapses had just been singed, blitzed by a notion that was both true and not true. I couldn’t articulate the insight that sat between the two, so I set out to find it. In this blog I write about what I learned.
Supporting large and small firms with their growth strategy.
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