FireFly Facilitation

In a recent Accenture survey, 89% of executives agreed that innovation is as important as cost management for high performance.  This indicates a big shift from 2009.  The emphasis for most companies last year was on how to cut expenses.  This year, there is the realization that you can’t cut your way to business growth.  And this survey bears that out.

Okay, from the Accenture survey we know execs think innovation is important.  Below is the Daily Stat email I receive from Harvard Business Review (a very valuable resource that I strongly encourage you to check out).  From this Ernst and Young survey, we can see that only half of the senior executives see their companies as more innovative than their competition – and 17% even say their less innovative than peers.   

There are several reasons cited for this.  For example, while many companies are investing more in innovation, only a few have a rigorous approach for managing the process.  As a result even innovative companies often fail to realize the benefits that their new ideas could produce.

Interestingly, almost half of them blame the lack of appropriate personnel as a major contributor to their lack of innovation.  You know as well as I do that you can’t just go getting rid of everyone you don’t think is creative – and in fact you don’t have to.  There are ways – which I will share with you in later blog posts – for discovering and tapping into the creativity in each of us. 

And this is where you come in.  Strategic, progressive leaders have an incredible role to play in boosting the innovation occurring within their companies – and it all begins with employee engagement.   Next post – some proven ideas for how to engage your top talent.

Innovation….when you hear this word, what comes to mind?  When I pose this question to a group, I often hear “Apple”, “Something new”, or similar response.

If you look it up in a standard dictionary, like Websters or American Heritage, the definition is simple and straightforward: ”the introduction of something new.”  If, however, you look it up in Business Dictionary.com, you get a very different result: “The process by which an idea or invention is translated into a good or service for which people will pay.  To be called an innovation, an idea must be replicable at an economical cost and must satisfy a specific need.”

The “regular” person’s definition is so much better and more freeing than the business minded one.  I call this the difference between innovation with a little “i” – innovation for everyone – and innovation with a big “I” that stands up to the very tough scrutiny of the business world.   We wonder why we see innovation as a slogan by top execs instead of something that actually gets done.  How do you know if something is going to make money unless you give it a chance?  In many companies we cut new ideas off at the knees because we can’t see right off how it can possibly be profitable.

Let me tell you the story of Alexander Fleming.  It’s 1928 and apparently Dr. Fleming is a pretty messy scientist.  One day he’s cleaning out the petri dishes he had been using to grow bacteria.  Something catches his eye.  Something had contaminated one of the staph cultures – in fact it had killed the bacteria.

Do you know what he had discovered – penicillin — by accident!  “When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer,” Fleming would later say, “But I guess that was exactly what I did.”

A huge success, right?  Wrong!  There were so many difficulties associated with producing penicillin in mass quantities, it would be another 12 years before the world realized what he had created.  We need the broader definition of innovation…so that we can celebrate the learning…not just the end result.

What “discoveries” - no matter how small and seemingly insignificant – have you made recently?  What can you find to celebrate – not just the end result but what you learned from it – and how you can apply those learnings?

Change By Design by Tim Brown (2009)

 I recently had the opportunity to lead a book club discussion on this fantastic guide to innovation, Change By Design by Tim Brown, CEO of renowned design firm IDEO and guru of the next wave of innovation… “design thinking” .  Below are some key excerpts you can check out to see if you want to read the whole book – or just get by with these cliff notes!

What is design thinking?

“An approach to innovation that is powerful, effective, and broadly accessible, that can be integrated into all aspects of business and society, and that individuals and teams can use to generate breakthrough ideas that are implemented and that therefore have an impact.”

 Why do we need it?

“As the center of economic activity in the developing world shifts inexorably from industrial manufacturing to knowledge creation and service delivery, innovation has become nothing less that a survival strategy.  It is moreover no longer limited to the introduction of new physical products but includes new sorts of processes, services, interactions, entertainment forms, and ways of communicating and collaborating.” 

 How does it work?

     “The continuum of innovation is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps.  We can think of them as inspiration, the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions; ideation, the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas; and implementation, the path that leads from the project room to market.”

     “The willing and even enthusiastic acceptance of competing constraints is the foundation of design thinking. The first stage of the design process is often about discovering which constraints are important and establishing a framework for evaluating them.  Constraints can best be visualized as a series of overlapping criteria for successful ideas: feasibility (what is functionally possible within the foreseeable future); viability (what is likely to become part of a sustainable business model); and desirability (what makes sense to people and for people).”

     “The classic starting point of any design project is the brief…a set of mental constraints that gives the project team a framework from which to begin, benchmarks by which they can measure progress, and a set of objectives to be realized: price point, available technology, market segment, and so on…The clarity, direction, and limits of a well-defined project are vital to sustaining a high level of creative energy.”

     “The tools of the design thinker – getting out into the world to be inspired by people, using prototyping to learn with our hands, creating stories to share our ideas, joining forces with people from other disciplines – and ways of deepening what we know and widening the impact of what we do.”

 Who excels at it?

“There is a popular saying around IDEO that ‘all of us are smarter than any of us’…To operate within an interdisciplinary environment, an individual needs to have strengths in two dimensions – the ‘T-shaped’ person…On the vertical axis, every member of the team needs to possess a depth of skill that allows him or her to make tangible contributions to the outcome….Design thinkers cross the ‘T’…people with the capacity  and – just as important – the disposition for collaboration across disciplines.  In the end, this ability is what distinguishes the merely multidisciplinary team from a truly interdisciplinary one…There is a collective ownership of ideas and everybody takes responsibility for them.”

What cultural environment is needed?

“To be creative, a place does not need to be crazy, kooky, and located in northern California.  What is a prerequisite is an environment – social but also spatial – in which people know they can experiment, take risks, and explore the full range of their faculties.”

What are the benefits to the organization?

“There is an important lesson here about the challenges of shifting from a culture of hierarchy and efficiency to one of risk taking and exploration.  Those who navigate this transition successfully are likely to become more deeply engaged, more highly motivated, and more wildly productive than they ever have before.”

[Two great examples of successful design projects – Bank of America (p. 119+) and Japan’s Cool Biz (p. 127+)

Potential Discussion Questions:

1. What are three highlights from what you read – either things you strongly agreed or disagreed with?
2. Do you believe it is possible to create a culture of design thinkers?  Why or why not?
3. Are there clients that you think might be ready participants in the introduction of design thinking into their culture?
4. What would it take to create this culture?  How would you approach from a change management perspective?
5. What do you think would be the greatest challenges you would face?  How would you overcome them?
6. Do you believe in the business case and need for a new approach to innovation in this next decade?

Innovation can be spelled with a capital “I” – culturally imbedded across well-known companies such as Apple, P&G, Google and Starbucks – or with a small “i” – going on everyday in many less-recognized companies and myriad teams across the country. So what can we learn from the big innovation players?

Apple – Be very clear on your innovation philosophy.   Apple has a clear focus on the customer experience; design takes priority.  Whenever I ask audiences to share what comes to mind when they hear the word “innovation”, Apple is always named.  We can also see Apple as a cautionary tale – if innovation is too wrapped up in one person. You saw the stock price dip (not only for Apple, but for the tech sector in general) when the world learned Steve Jobs had cancer – because he is seen as the creative genius behind all their new product development.  In fact, I have it on very good authority that he is the leader of a 10-person creative team that is the sole inspiration behind all their incredible new products.

Google – Make time for employee innovation.  Very different than the perceived “lone creative genius model” of Apple, Google believes in making innovation everyone’s responsibility.  You have likely heard they allow their employees to spend 20% of their time away from their “real jobs” to focus on their pet projects. You might have just marked that up to their being one of those “weird, California, bring-your-dog-to-work and get-a-back-massage” kind of companies.  But you want to know the real reason Google does it?  The founders tracked the progress of of ideas they had backed versus ones executed in the ranks without support from above.  What did they find? There is a higher success rate with ideas that came from lower in the ranks.  Maybe the ideas were better or maybe it’s just because the commitment to execute was higher.

Proctor & Gamble – High-tech companies aren’t the only innovators.  Very different from these other companies, P&G is an old company with (in many cases) “old” brands and products.  This company has to find new ways to make money in mature markets.   They have an incredible success rate for their new product introductions – but it wasn’t always that way.  It went from 1 in every 6 new product introductions having a positive ROI when AG Lafley took over as CEO in 2000 (about standard for the consumer packaged goods industry) to 1 out of every 2 new product introductions today.  How?  Like Jobs, Lafley had a laser-sharp focus on understanding the consumer needs & he established disciplined, repeatable, and scalable innovation processes.  He also moved the responsibility and source for innovation outside the walls of R&D, and even outside the walls of their own company. Innovation is now completely embedded in their organization.  It is the way they do business.

Starbucks – There is room in the innovation tent for both left-brain and right-brain thinking.  CEO  Howard Shultz had always run the business based on intuition.  Now with the tougher marketplace, he’s having to gather more data.   During one such deep dive into the data, he discovered they were wasting millions in milk since they don’t resteam milk for product safety reasons.  Did they go with a high-tech solution?  No – one of the employees suggested they simply etch a line on the inside of measuring pitchers versus having the barista’s wing it.  According to an interview with Shultz, this became an incredible internal succcess story – and led to more small changes with huge impacts.

Summary:

• Be very clear on your innovation philosophy. 
• Make time for employee innovation. 
• High-tech companies aren’t the only innovators.
• There is room in the innovation tent for both left-brain and right-brain thinking.  

Did you know that Yellowstone National Park sits on top of a gigantic supervolcano? Molten rock simmering beneath the earth’s surface causes the park’s bubbling geysers, boiling mud pots, and hissing thermal vents. An eruption of Yellowstone’s volcano would have cataclysmic consequences on the environment, and is capable of wiping out vast stretches of North America.

Have you ever been around a “volcanic coworker”—a person prone to angry outbursts? If so, then you know the damage such a person poses to the work environment. When they erupt, they spew out toxic emotions on everyone else and cause irreparable damage to team dynamics.

How do you defuse a coworker who appears to be on the verge of a destructive eruption?

1) Give them safe outlets to vent negative feelings.

Volcanoes erupt because of the building pressure of toxic gases trapped beneath the earth’s surface. If the gases have an escape valve, then no eruption occurs.

2) Keep them away from combustible situations.

Volcanic eruptions are fueled when fresh inflows of molten rock add volume to the caldron of magma boiling under the earth’s crust. Absent of the added inflows, a volcano lacks sufficient energy to erupt.

3) Turn down their temperature by removing stressful assignments.

Volcanoes are triggered by intense heat that can liquefy rock. Reduce the hotness, and your remove the threat of an eruption.