LIVING “COLLABORATIVE.”  Once the teams spent fifteen minutes orienting themselves to their problems, they had a chance to actively experience collaboration. It started by defining how they wanted to work together as a team in ways that accentuate collaboration. To surface and subsequently amplify the team’s various talents and experiences, each team member shared their unique “superpower.” This led to some introspection and humor as people gainfully explained their various powers to their newly acquainted team members. Next, they reflected on how the various superpowers shared could help them collaborate better as a team. The exercise sometimes uncovers surprises, like the lawyer who writes poetry, or hidden skills, like the HR representative who studied finance and has experience in financial modeling.⁸

At this point another infused BEAN came into play: DBS’s MOJO program (detailed in the DBS case study after chapter 2). Each team appointed a meeting owner (MO) and joyful observer (JO) to ensure more effective discussions and collaborations. The sidebar “Natalie’s Favorite Ice Breakers” has additional tips for encouraging session members to enter into “collaborative” and “customer-obsessed” modes.

LIVING “CUSTOMER OBSESSION.”  To help the teams better understand the problems they were solving they next followed the behavior of customer obsession. We shared the foundational concept of the job to be done: the fundamental problem a customer is trying to solve in a given circumstance (described in more depth in several of Innosight’s books). We also shared practical tips to discover jobs to be done during customer discussions, such as:

• Ask why, then ask it again. (This helps get to underlying causality.)
• Start broad to understand the context.
• Ask neutral, nonleading questions.
• Do not provide multiple choices; just pause.
• Be precise: set a limit of ten words to a question.
• Trust actions over statements: encourage stories or ask for a demonstration.

This wasn’t abstract instruction. Each team then received a profile of a real customer they would meet, a simple interview guide to help prompt probing questions, and a template to capture the answers.⁹ For example, the interview guide for the team solving the onboarding issue prompted them to get the customer to walk them through her own onboarding process, step by step, describing her emotions and digging into specific frustrations to help them identify places to innovate.

Armed with these guides, each team set off to various parts of the building to meet and interview real customers about their real business problems. Alumni came to share their views with the alumni team, the onboarding team interviewed employees who had joined that month, and so on. These customer interviews helped each team to build fundamental insights and to frame the problems they were solving from the perspectives of the customers they were serving—an imperative for the customer-obsessed organization.

LIVING “CURIOSITY.”  With the job to be done now clear, teams embraced curiosity to develop innovative solutions. Each team received prepared stimuli to help them broaden their thinking and question the status quo. The stimuli included HR trends, technologies, and relevant case studies from organizations that had created innovative solutions to similar problems. For example, the onboarding team considered trends such as rising employee expectations and the role that a technology solution—such as one that enabled verified electronic signing of employment contracts—could play in their solution. An inspiring case study outlining how L’Oréal’s culture app assists its 11,000 yearly new-hires to understand, decode, and master their unique company culture supplemented this. Case studies help reinforce the idea that the curious seek inspiration from those who have solved their problems before, whether they are in related fields or in fields as unrelated as cosmetics is to telecommunications.

To develop and prioritize solutions to a customer job to be done, teams referenced the stimuli and followed the same structured “diverge to converge” ideation process that Innosight uses in its innovation consulting work. There is no great secret to this process, but our experience leads to three practical suggestions:

1. Give people a few minutes to think on their own, which helps to avoid groupthink and creates a broad base of different ideas.
2. Give people more than one chance to develop and edit ideas.
3. Keep the timing tight to keep energy high. Better to leave people wanting more than to have them get bored!

Another suggestion is to ask people specific questions that can open up new avenues for exploration. For example, you might ask workshop attendees to consider the following:

• How might we address pain points or frustrations?
• How might we enhance what is currently working?
• What would “awesome” look and feel like?
• How might digital technologies help?

LIVING “ADEPTNESS IN AMBIGUITY.”  At this stage each team had a solution on paper. But every innovative solution is partially right and partially wrong. The trick to successful innovation is to figure out, as quickly and cheaply as possible, which parts are which. This requires navigating strategic uncertainty through disciplined identification of critical assumptions and rigorous experimentation.

And so, the participants experienced what it was like to experience adeptness in ambiguity. They received a quick dose of innovation theory on assumptions (drawing on content from Scott’s book The First Mile) and undertook exercises to practice identifying and organizing assumptions. The teams identified their biggest assumptions about their solutions and considered the impact it would have if those assumptions were wrong. High-uncertainty, high-impact assumptions need tackling first, so teams designed experiments that could address those critical assumptions. By the end of this activity, each team had completed a simple template describing their idea, a version of which appears in figure 4-2.

LIVING “EMPOWERMENT.”  An empowered team exercises initiative to make decisions confidently and takes responsibility for their actions. To reinforce this empowerment, Tan had pre-agreed to implement at least one solution from the group, under the sponsorship and guidance of the selected team’s senior leadership representative.

Each team pitched their proposed solutions. Some simple yet highly effective ideas emerged. For example, the team creating an awesome onboarding experience learned that new joiners often arrived early on their first day. Then they sat and waited in the reception area, unclear of what was in front of them. The experience increased the anxiety that naturally accompanies a first day. So the team decided to issue new joiners, before their first day, a coupon for the café located in the reception area. This provided a double benefit, showing hospitality and filling an otherwise nerve-wracking time. This idea could also be expanded to connect several people being onboarded on the same day, so that the first cup of coffee could be a shared experience with someone in the same position. After all, the company’s raison d’être is to help people connect and communicate!

GET GRANULAR ABOUT DESIRED BEHAVIORS.  The first step of the BEANstorm process requires teams to get granular, turning their allocated behavior from a lofty term into specific ways of working that fit their organizational context. For example, the team tasked with the curiosity behavior defined more specific ways of working such as not being complacent, being open to new ideas, and adopting a learning mindset. Each team had a detailed report from the culture of innovation survey to guide the discussion. Teams then got even more specific, describing what it would look like if they followed this behavior on a day-to-day basis in HR. For example, an HR leader adopting a learning mindset would strive for continuous individual improvement and regularly upskill himself.

If a team got stuck in this activity, they were encouraged to complete the statement, “It would be great if we could …,” as precisely as possible. The goal here is to establish a behavior versus a state of mind, so you want verbs, which result from saying, “We will do this,” versus nouns, which result from saying, “We are this.” The more specific, the better. For example, one group working on collaboration started with “We will break silos” as a desired behavior before going deeper to state, “We will staff project teams with representatives from at least three functions.”

Once each team established a long list of both broad and specific behaviors, they prioritized the one behavior they felt would have the greatest impact on their culture if established as an everyday ritual or habit. Prioritization is important. The more specific the behavior, the easier it is to create high-impact BEANs. Trying to solve for multiple behaviors risks overly complicated BEANs. Getting granular helps to maximize impact.

IDENTIFY BEHAVIORAL BLOCKERS.  At this point, each team had defined with some specificity ways of working that encapsulated the given behavior and had described what that would look and feel like in practice. They next turned their attention to describing what is currently blocking these behaviors. In other words, why aren’t these behaviors happening already? The group brought up and discussed blockers that many readers will likely find familiar, such as being overly metric-oriented (key performance indicators, or KPIs, in the case of Singtel), jumping straight to solutions, and being afraid to make mistakes. Not to be a broken record, but the more granular you make the blocker, the better. We see people frequently start with blockers like “We don’t have time” or “We don’t have proper training.” These kinds of superficial blockers seem easy to fix. For example, if you lack skills, either invest in training, hire new people who have those skills, or form a team of experts to accelerate progress. Our experience shows, however, that blockers are typically more subtle. Culture is complicated and interdependent. If you don’t get under the surface, interventions won’t work. In other words, if you give people more time, they will often fill it by continuing to do things the wrong way. If you train them in new skills, they often won’t use them, because they don’t fit existing routines. And so on. What you want to identify is what we call a “behavioral blocker.” In other words, your goal is to follow behavior A (“It would be great if we could …”). But, instead, you are following behavior B (“But instead we …”).¹⁰ If you are brainstorming about blockers and you hear someone say something superficial, ask, “Why do we do this?” or “Can you be more specific?” For example, one group we worked with said fear was blocking its desire to be adept in ambiguity. Digging deeper surfaced their fear that a leader might ask for more data on an idea, which would lead to more work. So in meetings, instead of proposing that they test an idea, which they worried would bring extra work, they would sit silently.¹¹

Clearly, the more crisply you identify what is blocking the desired behaviors, the easier it is to develop a high-impact way to overcome it. Discussing blockers can be difficult, however, because instead of focusing on positive, affirmative behaviors, participants are looking at the challenges, which means the conversation can easily become despondent and discouraging. It is hard to discuss something that is often subtle or even countercultural. So bring some levity to it. For Singtel, we built a wall. We told each person to pick up a tissue box that had been spray-painted brick-red and yellow. Each person wrote down the biggest blocker to his or her own target behavior on the brick and signed it. Then as Pink Floyd’s “Just Another Brick in the Wall” started playing, each person came forward and ceremoniously placed a brick on the ever-rising wall. As you can imagine, forty-two-plus (because several enthusiasts made more!) tissue boxes stacked on the floor creates a reasonably sized wall. And the group physically dismantling the wall at the end of a day of BEANstorming is a powerful moment. Further, the ritual of group construction brought the blockers to life and created the opportunity for another ritual: at the end of the day, people could retrieve their bricks and place them on their desks. There, the bricks would serve not only as a handy source of tissue but as a daily reminder of the blockers they were striving to overcome. (For another approach to surface and describe blockers, see the sidebar “Surfacing Blockers at DBS.”)

BRAINSTORM AND REFINE BEANS.  Each team now knew what it needed to do: find a way to encourage a specific behavior or overcome one of the blockers in the wall that occupied a significant amount of space in the room. At this point, we formally introduced the idea of a BEAN. Of course, people had used BEANs such as Amazon.com’s Future Press Release, DBS’s MOJO, and our popsicle and premium ice cream prizes, but we had consciously avoided going deep into BEANs until this moment. We described what BEANs are, why they work, and what the elements of a successful BEAN are, drawing on the material detailed in chapter 3.

Teams then followed the same basic diverge-and-converge process used the day before to create solutions to their business problems. Each team received customized stimuli, including relevant videos and a curated “bag of BEANs.” The bag contained cards that showcased examples of organizations from around the world that had created BEANs relevant to behaviors and specific ways of working. For example, the “adeptness in ambiguity” team might consider Spotify’s Fail Wall, which publicly shares a team’s failure so that others can learn from it. As Pablo Picasso famously said, “Good artists copy, great artist steal.”

Surfacing Blockers at DBS

As part of helping DBS purposefully shape the culture at Hyderabad, Innosight commissioned Tom Fishburne to create customized cartoons. (Tom is a Harvard Business School graduate who runs a boutique agency that develops cartoons for business purposes.) One cartoon he created shows a harried executive addressing a group of people, saying, “Does anyone else have a hypothesis they would like to test?” Meanwhile, the previous responder to his question squats in the corner in shame. This resonated with Singaporeans, in particular, as this is a traditional school punishment for bad behavior in that locale. Another illustration shows an executive assistant at his desk, holding out his phone’s receiver to an executive rushing past him toward a full conference room. The assistant says, “The voice of the customer is on line two.” The hassled executive responds, “Take a message. We’re having a meeting on customer obsession.” A meeting on a topic crowds out actually doing the topic? Golden.

The cartoons themselves were a great way to start discussions about how DBS would really become adept in ambiguity and customer-obsessed, but the process of coming up with them was just as important. We had a cross-functional team of DBS leaders who all cared about shaping the bank’s culture. Tom led them in conversation to uncover specific stories that showcased DBS’s falling short of its aspiration of being a 28,000-person startup. Their discussion time was candid and critical, but it was also filled with laughter as people recounted the day-to-day foibles that are all too typical inside organizations. The team left engaged and eager to solve the problems, and the resulting cartoons made it safe for broader groups to engage in conversations whenever they saw executives clinging to old ways.

In a 2018 TED talk, Fishburne shared his perspective about the power of humor in business contexts. “I think that what gets in the way is fear. I think it is exactly the same fear that keeps us from trying new things, keeps us stuck in the status quo, and holds us back from doing our best work,” he said. “And I think that a sense of humor is one of the most important, but completely overlooked, tools in business. If we really want to overcome that fear, we have to learn to laugh at ourselves.”

By the end of a high-energy forty-five-minute session, each team had completed an initial template outlining the behavior they wanted to encourage (“It would be great if we could …”), the behavioral blocker they needed to overcome (“But instead we …”), a sketch of the BEAN, and a description of how it combined behavior enablers, artifacts, and nudges to drive change. A version of the BEAN template appears in figure 4-3.

Armed with their draft BEANs, each team then followed a “speed-dating” process to get rapid feedback. Two “BEANbassadors” were appointed by each team to rotate around the room and showcase their BEANs to receive feedback from their colleagues against five questions:

1. Can we imagine implementing this BEAN within Singtel Group HR?
2. Will people have sufficient incentives to incorporate the BEAN into day-to-day life?
3. Can we imagine using the BEAN repeatedly?
4. Will it be effective in driving behavioral change?
5. How will we define and measure the success of the BEAN?

After digesting the feedback, teams refined the BEANs and developed plans to operationalize them. Teams detailed how they would launch their BEAN and how they would track and measure it.

PITCH AND SELECT WINNING BEANS.  Finally, each team pitched their resulting BEAN to their colleagues and Tan. We encouraged the groups to bring energy to the pitch by role-playing a skit that brought their BEAN to life (and brought a bit of levity to a reasonably grueling two days). Singtel Group HR leaders evaluated the most feasible, high-impact BEANs and approved those that met the criteria to progress.

Time for one last BEAN infusion! This time the Innosight team introduced an adapted version of Adobe’s Kickbox (described in chapter 3). The “Singtel Group HR Kickbox” that each winning BEANstorming team received contained a half day of leave for each team member, which they could devote to developing the idea further, another half day of paid time off as a reward, and a S$500 credit to fund the BEAN’s refinement.

One example BEAN included an idea to reinforce customer obsession. The behavior the team wanted to encourage was to bring the voice of the customer (in this case, Singtel employees) into every HR discussion. The behavioral blocker identified was that Singtel typically started discussions with questions like “What are we planning on doing?” and not “What problem are we trying to solve?” or “For whom are we solving that problem?” As a result, the HR team too frequently succumbed to overly inward thinking. The core behavior enabler was a proposed ritual to make sure that every meeting included discussion around the question, “Who Is The Customer Here?” (which forms the memorable acronym WITCH). In addition, they would seek to answer, “What is the concern?” and “What is the conclusion?” The WITCH acronym lent itself to multiple artifacts to reinforce the idea. A few months after the workshop, employee laptops began to don WITCH stickers that featured a witch’s hat as a visible reminder (and a nice nudge) that everyone has a customer and that this customer has jobs to be done that need solving. Around eighteen months after the activation session, Tan told Scott and Andy at a catch-up meeting that she believed the WITCH BEAN was having a significant impact on the HR group, and she shared stories reinforcing its power to focus them on constructive discussions around the customer, the concern, and the conclusion, in turn ensuring more effective and efficient decision-making.

FIRST, PROVE WHY CULTURE MATTERS BEFORE SOLVING CULTURE.  People must live new behaviors before they design ways to encourage and enable them. Just because almost everyone intuitively understands the importance of culture does not mean that everyone is willing to dedicate time to progressing culture. Providing firsthand experience about the power of particular behaviors is the best way to convince people of the importance of BEANstorming in order to enable those behaviors.

SECOND, GET GRANULAR.  The more specific the behavior, the more specific the blocker, the better the BEAN. BEANs work well when targeting a specific behavior, such as bringing the voice of the customer into meetings, instead of targeting a broader way of working, such as customer obsession.

THIRD, INFUSE BEANS WHEN CREATING BEANS.  A great BEANstorm should include BEANs. These not only make the BEANstorm more fun and engaging, but they reinforce the idea that a great BEAN has power to improve the way we work.