The focus of this chapter is helping people to find solutions to their most intractable problems by asking different questions, finding ways to really share and value all ideas and looking for solutions in unexpected places. As a team leader, you need to inspire your team to plug their existing knowledge together in ways that produce breakthrough possibilities. When you are faced with a gap in your knowledge you will commonly seek the assistance of someone more experienced who works in exactly the same domain as yourself, but often the greatest insight can be found from people who, at first glance, don’t appear to be anything like you or engaged in the same endeavours as you are.5 This chapter will show you ways in which you can start to tap into wells of much greater knowledge and insight.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?
It is common to presume that innovation is always the result of a bright idea and that such bright ideas only occur inside the heads of seriously clever people, people who are not in any way like us, people who are collected together in a special department, often called ‘research and development’.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Increasingly, we see innovation not as something that occurs inside the heads of smart people, but rather as something that happens in the spaces between inquisitive people.
What really makes innovation work is connecting people, especially people who think differently and have different skills and experience.
Innovation is not the same as creativity; the focus is not on conjuring up something amazing out of nothing, but rather on finding new ways of plugging together existing knowledge to deliver new and exciting outcomes.
We often hear people say ‘Oh, I’m not a creative person’, or ‘I’m no good at thinking strategically’, or ‘I’ve never had an original idea’. The manager’s job is to help people to rise above such self-limiting statements of personal inadequacy. We are all innovators in our own way, and when we engage constructively with people who see the world in a slightly different light from ourselves, we open up the possibility of producing great new insights and new ways of working.
THE IMPACT OF THE ISSUE
Our organisations face many challenges: doing more with fewer resources, changing demographics, skills shortages, environmental pressures, evolving legislative structures and financial pressures, to name but a few. One thing is for sure, doing more of the same, or just focusing on getting better at what you can already do well, is not a sustainable model. This is not a new phenomenon and is captured nicely by one of the greatest thinkers of our time:
The significant problems that we face cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that created them. (Albert Einstein)
Or, to put it in the form of a mantra increasingly popular with senior leaders:
If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got. (Henry Ford)
Innovation is about finding combinations of new and existing insights that generate new possibilities for our customers to fulfil their ‘jobs to be done’.
MAKING SENSE OF IT ALL
Being great at innovation is not a matter of luck. Organisations and teams that are good at innovating tend to have a characteristic culture, a culture that values constructive questioning, healthy co-operation and an openness to new experiences and ways of thinking. Innovations are most likely to happen when a team has:
A relatively young Luxembourg-based bank offered investment products to high-net-worth individuals. Over time they had introduced more and more checks and balances, meaning that a new customer would now not receive interest on their investment for seven days after deposit – this led to some very unhappy customers. Tom, a newly appointed business relationship manager, together with a stranger met by chance while waiting for a delayed flight, together came up with a revolutionary solution: the company took out an insurance policy to mitigate any risk of mistake and could therefore revert back to the one day processing times it originally offered for new deposits.
You will increase your chance of seeing anew when you cross organisational or industry boundaries – innovations nearly always come by applying something from one field or scientific discipline to another field or scientific discipline. People who can span boundaries are critical to increasing innovation.
Innovation also needs to be managed differently from business as usual. In business as usual, the emphasis has to be on right first time and every time. However, in order to innovate you must experiment and when you experiment you must expect to fail. So, managing for an innovative culture means that you must strive for ultimate success while embracing the possibility of many small failures along the way. You should embrace those failures and view them as a learning opportunity.
IT people frequently strive to perfect what they already know. By contrast, innovation usually involves grappling with unknown quantities and unpredictable consequences; under these circumstances, hitting the jackpot first time is unlikely and perfection is well downstream.
For innovation to thrive, you need to cultivate a culture that values people who try, however imperfectly, to seize the unknown. Figure 4.1 depicts the three pillars of an innovative culture built upon the solid foundations of a highly tuned productive capacity.
The three core capabilities that underpin innovation are:
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Research shows6 that poorly performing teams tend to ask 1 question for every 20 statements. High-performing teams have a ratio much closer to 1 to 1.
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A good question can act as an igniting catalyst for a team and challenge and inspire them; a bad question can debilitate them and freeze them into inactivity.
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The best questions are future-focused and challenge existing thinking, collective wisdom and organisational or industry paradigms; they may shake deeply held personal values or beliefs.
A new CIO took over an IT function with a poor reputation that wasn’t seen to ‘deliver value for money’ or ‘understand and act on business priorities’. The new CIO dared to ask the question, ‘What if we could become a profit centre – imagine the impact that could have on our standing within the organisation?’ With the support and encouragement of her team, the new CIO drew up a marketing plan focusing on their multi-language capability that was to become their USP (unique selling point). Six months down the road saw a turnaround in IT’s reputation and a small, but significant, contribution to the bottom line of the organisation.
A manufacturing company had an unofficial strike on its hands and wanted to pay those in work but not those on strike. As a consequence, it couldn’t run the normal payroll system, which would pay everyone. A team was formed comprising representatives from payroll, IT development, IT operations and the various manufacturing departments. They worked hard for long hours; there was lots of good humoured banter; and agile methods were deployed. Everyone was willing to share knowledge and everyone was willing to compromise their needs in order to meet the pay deadline. Within three days they had developed a very crude but operational payroll system.
A small butcher based in north London had been adversely affected by the arrival of a supermarket. As it was difficult to compete on price, the owner sought a different solution. As a result of a conversation with some ‘tech’ guys he met in his local pub one lunchtime, he fitted inexpensive sensors inside the store window to monitor pedestrian footfall via people’s mobile phones. The findings proved the busiest time outside the shop was between 9 p.m. and midnight, when passers-by were heading to, or leaving, the two nearby pubs.
Using Google Trends, a free online tool, the owner investigated what the most popular food searches were and decided to open for a few hours in the evening selling pulled pork burgers and premium hot dogs. Now a significant chunk of his revenue comes from this small opening slot and his profit margins are much higher; in addition, he is using up meat that, in the past, would have gone to waste.
Too often people ignore insights from passing acquaintances or those lower down the organisational totem pole, or from others without their knowledge or with fewer qualifications.
Insight can, and does, come from anywhere – great innovators are constantly looking for different perspectives ‘any time, any place, anywhere’.
We will split our practical advice into three sections to reflect the three distinct capabilities that are so important for stimulating innovation. Let’s start with ways to stimulate questions that open up possibilities:
1.
Think of questions as a way to kick-start thinking and learning. Ask open, non-leading questions and phrase them in the future tense. Look for questions that challenge deeply held beliefs.
2.
Rather than telling people what to do, try describing an outcome that you would like to achieve and then ask questions like:
a.
What would it feel like to work in that kind of environment?
b.
If we had this in place, what would we be able to do that we can’t do now?
c.
What do we need to put in place now to start moving in this direction?
d.
What can you do individually that could support us all in this change?
3.
Ask your team what one thing they could do that would transform the service they give to their customers:7
a.
Get your team to prioritise the ideas.
b.
Get them to work up some of the ideas into a practicable proposal.
c.
Get them to vote on which of the ideas are the most likely to be successful.
d.
See if you can start an experiment to check out the validity of the most popular idea – see how many people are prepared to invest some of their own spare time on the project.
e.
Once you have a working hypothesis, get the team to present it to management and see if you can get funding to take it further. Treat it like making a pitch to the bank manager for funding to start a new business.
Now let’s look at some things you can do to create or support a collaborative mindset and collaborative working practices. The first thing to realise is that stimulating collaboration starts with your recruitment and induction processes.
Recruiting – When recruiting, we tend to look for people who can do the things we do and appear to be enthusiastic about how we do it. We are attracted to people who think like we do and hold similar values to ourselves. The problem with this is that we run the risk of hiring a bunch of people just like us; this is commonly referred to as the ‘comfortable clone syndrome’. When we recruit, we have an opportunity to bring in fresh ideas and new thinking, so actively look for:
Induction processes – Our induction processes tend to focus on getting people to understand our processes, systems, values and beliefs. The idea is that the quicker we can get people to be just like us, the better. Actually, while we want new recruits to understand what we are trying to achieve, we should be slightly more wary about indoctrinating them into our ways, especially when a key element of their role is to be innovative in the solutions they produce. Try some of the following:
Collaboration – Collaboration is not about meekly doing what you are asked to do and joining in. It is about volunteering for a task because you are inspired by the possibility of producing a new level of service or a previously unimagined product. Before people can volunteer, they need to know what is going on and they need to be engaged. Try some of the following ideas:
Finally, let’s look at some of the things you can do to stimulate working across organisational boundaries and bringing ideas in from the outside:
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How are the people in the other role different?
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What are their main priorities?
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What are the big assumptions that appear to underpin their decision-making?
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What do they worry about most?
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What do they consider to be their biggest success in the last 12 months and why are they so proud of it?
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What three things do they do that our team should try to copy?
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What three things do they do that our team should try to avoid doing ourselves?
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How does someone with a good idea bring it to the attention of the management?
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What percentage of the ideas that they are working on came from outside their organisation (a process increasingly known as open innovation)?
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When they have a problem they can’t solve, how do they look for potential solution providers? Some organisations call this process scouting, i.e. looking for third-party providers who can bring new insight to an existing problem.
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What is their process for assessing the potential value of new ideas?
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Who decides who works on the key projects? What potential is there for people to volunteer their services or get involved with things that interest them?
THINGS FOR YOU TO WORK ON NOW
A strong focus of this chapter has been expanding your powers of perception by asking different questions and truly valuing ideas that come from external sources. Start by using the questions below to conduct an audit of how open you currently are to gathering external ideas. And once you have found new knowledge, how open are you to sharing and working collaboratively and how well do you model behaviours that encourage sharing and experimentation?
KEY QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF
Now use the techniques we have discussed to start to plan how you will manage the performance of your team differently. We suggest you start by focusing on the effect of your own language, specifically the way you frame challenges and the questions you ask of yourself and of your team. Your focus should be to use questions as a way of liberating your team to think rather than using questions as a weapon that drives people into their shells for fear of failing or looking stupid. As a first step try some of the things set out below.
MINI EXERCISES YOU CAN TRY IMMEDIATELY
FURTHER FOOD FOR THE CURIOUS
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A book full of fascinating examples of ideas crossing boundaries to drive new innovation.
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A fascinating read that charts the genesis of many great innovations and points to five key principles that underpin the development of all great ideas.
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This book points to four conditions that increase the likelihood that spontaneous innovation will flourish in organisations.
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A great read with many real-world examples of how asking different sorts of questions opens up amazing possibilities.
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A short and interesting article that points to practical ways in which you can search analogous or distant analogous fields to find solutions to the intractable problems that you face today.
5 Many great innovations came about by adapting or building upon ideas from one industry to solve problems in another. For a range of great examples of this phenomenon see Ramon Vullings and Marc Heleven’s book Not Invented Here: Cross-industry Innovation (2015).
6 Marcial Losada and Emily Heaphy in 2004 conducted one of the most comprehensive studies on the role of connectivity in the performance of business teams (The Role of Positivity and Connectivity in the Performance of Business Teams.
7 Some staff may come from a culture or environment where they were not expected or allowed to put forward ideas and this can make them reluctant to share their thoughts. In such cases trust and continual encouragement need to be built up over time through inclusion, active listening, positive feedback and respect.
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