A former colleague once lightened up an arduous appraisal meeting by presenting a critical "up or out" evaluation as a criminal case: did that person have the means, motive and the opportunity to do what we expect?
Bigger, more disruptive ideas are expected these days.
Finding new sources of growth is a must, whether to close the growth gap for shareholder value or to survive. Depending on the life stage one is in. However, in conversation with clients we hear that their organisation "just generates incremental ideas".
There is a huge gap between aspiration and reality.
Companies are in hyper-activity mode. Everyone wants to work with a startup and sends innovation scouts to Silicon Valley. Corporate VCs, hackathons and startup competitions pop up left and right. The innovation theatre in full swing. But no results. Real innovation is different. Moving forward big ideas can be irritating and confronting. Going against established policies and widely held beliefs infuriates people, as did Galileo Galilei's heliocentric models. True innovation will be questioned, even by your closest kin. It can be painful, scary, messy, full of dead ends. Should we start a riot with uncertain outcomes? No. Innovation is focused and structured creativity of the kind architects apply when envisioning landmark buildings.
So, how do you create co-conspirators in your innovation coup? Give people the means, motive and opportunity to act with you, for you.
Means
Hand out the tools to find unmet customer problems
For many companies, in B2B in particular, having a dialogue with the customer about their job to be done does not happen. To quote Theodore Levitt, "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole." The right questions need to be asked (5x Why). New words are to be learned to even express what we've discovered: Jobs. Circumstances. Hiring criteria. Workarounds. Barriers to consumption. All critical to explore the land of unsolved needs.
It was the biggest revelation from a participant during a joint session hosted by Clayton Christensen in Boston last summer. Crudely summarising Clayton: "In B2B, it is simple. Your customer's job is to make money. Ask him how he can make more money." The participant, a former global Key Account Manager, then revealed that the question was never asked at his company.
A structured approach to overcoming this is the working-backwards process as applied by Amazon. Employees submitting an idea need to file a one-page press release describing the customer problem and how it is solved, in language understood by ordinary people. This forces tech-savvy engineers to ask the right questions, to listen and observe, and to find how they can be of superior service to the unmet needs of their customers. It drives people into falling in love with the problem, not one specific solution.
Teach people to tell a captivating story
Start with a common innovation language. Once language is set, master the art of storytelling. Not long ago I met with engineers from one of the world's leading oil exploration companies. They were full of brilliant ideas. The ideas rarely received management approval. Business opportunities were lost. The engineers described technically ingenious details and held lengthy presentations on all potential risks. A different tack was required. All great stories have a well-known formula: the situation outlines the environment of your plot. Enter the villain providing the complication, the customer problem to be solved. This is then resolved by the white (or black) knight, your solution. Three simple steps to build the story, done.
Motive
Inspire by purpose
Organisations transforming the world explicitly state their mission to do so. It is the source back in the day at NASA, where a janitor confided to John F. Kennedy, "I work here, Mr. President, to put a man on the moon." And would Tesla ever be shaking up the established automotive industry without the ambitious vision to "accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy"? And how about Dove's "inner beauty", triggering the tear-jerking Dove Beauty Sketches? A clear motive calibrates the compass needle to pull people's thoughts and activities to a distant vision. It is what gets people to do the impossible. Oh, and this is not just "a millennial thing".
Peter Drucker put it well in 1973:
"That business purpose and business mission are so rarely given adequate thought is perhaps the most important cause of business frustration and failure."
Guide by well-defined search fields
Would you know where to search if your lighthouse is called "blockchain" or "digital disruption"? I regularly see teams struggle with this. Instead, as I observed at a chemicals manufacturer, define the sources of future growth as loosely quantified Strategic Opportunity Areas: the intersection of a large customer group, a customer problem worth solving, and a potential technology and/or business model pointing at a possible solution.
Encourage, not discourage
Build an atmosphere that honours the hard work necessary to succeed in the stony, iterative approach to real transformational ideas. Three components build such an environment:
Clear goals and boundaries. Ensure teams work on problems and solutions that are on strategy and avoid the pursuit of fruitless paths. I once sat through a day of project reviews on which people had directed their entire energy over the past six months. Half of those presented were shut down by management for reasons that could have been clear from the start. Some tears, opportunity lost. Define therefore what is desirable, what is off the table, and what can be discussed.
De-risking of critical assumptions. Expect setbacks that can be corrected by high-velocity decision-making before mistakes become hurtful. Jeff Bezos in his 2016 shareholder letter explains it all.
Visible leadership when things go wrong. Show from the top that innovation is about "to keep learning and improving", as Microsoft's Satya Nadella shared per email to his company immediately after an AI team had to shut down an out-of-control chatbot.
Opportunity
Review your idea prioritisation criteria, explicit and implicit
Most managers follow a set of values, including their own incentive schemes, that result in short-term, margin-oriented thinking. The idea does not make it to the CEO, who might have a different perspective. The present cost structure determines business cases and limits opportunities to take on exponential growth journeys. I find this a great insight in how companies operate, as vividly described in Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Solution. Also, it is safer, cheaper and requires less effort to just come up with incremental improvements than game-changing products. An appliances executive confided to me recently:
"Only troubled BUs come up with really new ideas, as they have nothing to lose. All others continue to develop the next version."
Another example: the CMO of a leading consumer goods company mentioned that rebalancing financial, NPV-driven thinking versus consumer job orientation is one of the critical challenges facing the company today.
Enable interaction with strangers
The magic happens at the intersections of different, driven people searching for new endeavours. Companies pursuing strategies to become agile radically redesign their office layouts to encourage seemingly random meetings. Classic examples are Steve Jobs's famous Pixar Studios, designed for people to meet spontaneously, or the Impact Hub network where entrepreneurs can co-work and sharpen their emerging business plans. GE merged these ideas and invites university staff and students alongside entrepreneurs to visit and collaborate on inspiring ideas at GE FirstBuild.
Follow these ideas and your colleagues become partners-in-crime, ready to spark truly disruptive innovation.
As Sherlock Holmes would say: "You know my methods. Apply them."