Lesson 1: Innovation Can Happen Anywhere

Remember our definition of innovation? Something different that creates value. The intentional vagueness of the word “something” is a reminder that innovation can happen anywhere. DBS, The Salvation Army, and UNICEF clearly show this in action. Yes, DBS has introduced bold new products, such as the digital bank that has allowed it to enter new markets, but innovation has also helped it solve day-to-day problems, such as shortening ATM lines and helping customers who have lost cards. The dispersed nature of UNICEF and The Salvation Army’s Eastern Territory and the close connection to end markets has helped both to drive improvements ranging from mobile coffee dispensers to communications tools to use during disasters. So remember, no matter where you are or what you, do there is room for you to innovate!

Lesson 2: Innovation DOES Happen Everywhere

Every organization has at least some pockets of innovation. Following Steve Bussey’s cooking analogy from the case study that followed chapter 1, every organization has some intuitive “innovation chefs.” Organizations that desire to build a culture of innovation should follow the lead of The Salvation Army’s Eastern Territory and ask themselves, “What is working?,” “What’s possible?,” and “How do we do it better?,” rather than “What’s wrong?” and “How do we fix it?” These questions are based on appreciative inquiry, an approach aimed at encouraging and motivating change by focusing on positive experiences. A metaphor for appreciative inquiry is that organizations are “mysteries to be embraced” rather than “problems to be solved.” Research shows that following appreciative inquiry leads people to have more confidence and comfort in journeying to the unknown future by carrying forward parts of the past. So follow the light and find ways to make it shine more brightly.

Lesson 3: Incumbency Has Its Advantages

Where is the best home for someone who wants to innovate for impact? Ask most groups that question, and the typical response is a startup company. It is easy to get entranced by enthralling stories of legendary entrepreneurs who hustle and scrape to create world-changing enterprises. It is also easy to forget that these stories are extremely rare exceptions. The overwhelming majority of startup companies fail, even with smart, dedicated people pouring every ounce of effort into building the business. The NO-DETs are far from scrappy garage-based startups. They show, however, that incumbency has its advantages. Today, entrepreneurs can start a business spending basically nothing. But that means those businesses can be immediately copied, making success brutally difficult. The good news is, innovators inside large companies can access the same tools as entrepreneurs. They can combine those tools with hard-earned assets of scale. And that combination can be absolutely magical.⁹

Lesson 4: Culture Change Takes Time

Scott Cook from Intuit would say that Intuit’s change has been a decade in the making; Satya Nadella from Microsoft says culture change is never done. An organization’s culture is complicated, and purposefully changing that culture takes time. While every culture-change movement follows its own unique rhythm, it is helpful to consider the following general steps:

1. Define the desired culture.  Create an evocative story and detail specific behaviors that define the “tomorrow culture.”
2. Diagnose key blockers.  Zero in on the systems, behaviors, and norms that power the shadow strategy and stand in the way of success.
3. Implement BEANs.  Drive habit change with well thought out behavior enablers, artifacts, and nudges.
4. Hardwire supporting systems.  Reinforce the desired behaviors in formal systems (e.g., KPIs, budgets) and key processes (e.g. recruiting, training).
5. Role-model the desired behaviors.  Have leaders show the way, particularly during highly visible moments like project-review meetings.
6. Track and measure progress.  Use data to iterate toward the desired future state of culture.

This is hard work. Clever campaigns or snappy slogans have no impact without hard work to shape day-to-day behaviors, change the underlying environment, celebrate success stories, carefully handle failures along the way, and more.

Lesson 5: Use Specific Language

Clarity in language is a step that is often skipped in change efforts. That’s a problem, as a lack of common language can kill well-intentioned change efforts. People think that because they have picked a default language for meeting, whether it be English, Mandarin, Tagalog, or a particular regional dialect, they all understand each other. But often, people ascribe different meanings to the specific words they use, which means they end up talking past each other. For example, a cynic would view the phrase “culture of innovation” as a meaningless combination of business buzzwords strung together to cover the fact that the speaker wants to sound smart but doesn’t actually have anything to offer to the conversation. And there’s some truth to that. Don’t believe us? Next time you hear someone say “culture of innovation” in a meeting, stop the meeting. Ask everyone to take out a pen and paper and silently write down what “culture” and “innovation” both mean. We are willing to bet the price of this book that there will be substantial deviations in even very small teams that work together closely. Those two words are used frequently but rarely defined clearly; and the problem is compounded when they are combined. Whether you use the definitions in this book or definitions derived from elsewhere is irrelevant. What is relevant is to make sure you and your team use the same words and think the same thing when you say them. Get specific. Here is one way to test the specificity and clarity of your thinking. Imagine you are going to announce your culture change agenda. Think about how you will answer the following questions:

• To what? What are the specific behaviors that will characterize the tomorrow culture?
• Why haven’t we already done this? What blockers need to be addressed that we haven’t addressed?
• By whom? What are the specific resources that will head up the culture-change effort?
• How are we going to do it? What is our culture-change plan? What time and additional resources are behind it?

If your leadership team answers these questions differently, keep working until you have a clear, consistent view. Then think about a simple catch phrase that captures the essence of your efforts. Can you come up with (or borrow!) something as memorable as “28,000-person startup,” “consumer is boss,” and “learn-it-all?”

Lesson 6: Leaders Need to Lead, but Carefully

It is no accident that senior titles appear frequently in our stories. Culture change that sticks and scales requires active participation from senior leaders. P&G’s consumer-is-boss movement, for example, would likely fail if not for CEO A. G. Lafley’s stump speech and in-the-field role-modeling. Intuit’s design thinking movement fails too without Scott Cook’s carefully considered interventions. Settlement Music School doesn’t boldly embrace the idea of using music education to combat poverty without Helen Eaton’s leadership. Culture change can be localized, of course. A team, group, or department, such as the Singtel HR community, can have its own identifiable culture, which differs in significant ways from the overall organizational culture. Nonetheless, the leader of the locus of change needs to be willing to commit the time and energy to drive cultural transformation.

Scott’s Parting Thoughts

The writing of this book started with a 2019 experiment we did with Harvard Business Review called IdeaLab. As the name connotes, the intent was to create a laboratory for an idea. We had been thinking about how to purposefully shape a culture of innovation for some time, and the IdeaLab provided the opportunity to get a curated community to react to and strengthen what was essentially the alpha version of this book. So I thought it fitting to have my call to action come from my IdeaLab post from March 28, 2019, which follows (with slight alterations and additional footnotes).

All good things must come to an end. This is the last post that I, on behalf of a team that has included Innosight colleagues Rahul Nair,¹¹ Cathy Olofson, Natalie Painchaud, Andy Parker, Elliot Tan,¹² TY Tang, and DBS friend Paul Cobban, will introduce to the culture of innovation IdeaLab.

It has been a fun journey. As an artifact memorializing it, we have created a short document of “postcards” from the IdeaLab, including a few summary slides from our culture of innovation toolkit and a single page with links to each of our posts. Feel free to use the images in presentations and share profligately.¹³

Way back in mid-February¹⁴ I described how my Happy Harry got slapped on the wrist by our condo association in Singapore after expressing himself creatively. Harry is one of my four children. Our oldest son Charlie is thirteen and, this week, is representing Singapore in a big regional baseball tournament (Dad is serving as an assistant coach).¹⁵ Holly is eleven, currently doing an end-of-term research project on how video games affect the brain (when I was eleven, my brain was being affected by video games without my asking any questions about it!). Happy Harry is seven, and, if we’re honest, he does whine on occasion, but he also brings glorious curiosity and creativity to everything he does. And our little two-year-old Teddy just is a babbling brook of cuteness.¹⁶

The parallel experience of watching my children grow up while I have advised large organizations around the globe on how to confront the dilemmas of disruption has crystallized a belief within me, turning it into a conviction. The world’s biggest untapped source of energy isn’t in the wind, water, or sun. It’s inside established organizations. These organizations—companies, governments, hospitals, schools, and more—are populated with people who, like all people, entered the world naturally curious and creative. That curiosity and creativity has been blunted and constrained, but it is there. And organizations are only scratching the surface of their innovation potential.

My job as a father is to make sure my children never lose their love of learning. My job as an adviser to organizations is to help them release, harness, and amplify this same kind of latent energy. Imagine a world where the Curious Charlies, Hopeful Hollys, Happy Harrys, and Thoughtful Teddys break free of their shackles. Imagine a world where your employees show up to work every day in an environment where people feel like they are doing more than they thought possible. Imagine they go home with a spring in their step and the feeling that they have the best of both worlds.¹⁷ They can fuse the unique assets their organizations have built over decades—or, in some cases, centuries—together with the entrepreneurial energy that emboldens would-be disruptors around the world, and in doing so they can have a massive impact on the problems that matter to them. That world is different and better than today’s world. And it is within our grasp.

Good luck to each of you in your respective efforts to help the organizations that matter to you develop cultures in which the behaviors that drive innovation success come naturally.

Paul’s Parting Thoughts

Many factors have contributed to the successful transformation at DBS, not least of which has been the sustained supportive leadership of our CEO and executive team, and an enthusiastic workforce. However, it has been our sustained programmatic and inclusive approach that has set us apart from other transformations. Despite a widely held belief that bankers do not make good innovators, we made an early decision to bring all our people along for the journey, because we needed everyone to become an innovator if we were to realize our ambitions. We did set up a small innovation team but, as you have read, we gave the team instructions not to innovate. The team’s role was, and continues to be, to teach the rest of the company to innovate. Over the past ten years, we have executed a series of innovation programs, each building on the success of the previous one. Our key lesson was that, by creating a low barrier to participation, we saw our people grow in confidence, and they delivered results at scale. As Steve Jobs said, you “can only join the dots by looking back” and it was through reflection that we understood that we had unconsciously been creating counter-measures to some of our most persistent cultural blockers—interventions we would later call BEANs—and they were driving the behavioral shifts that were moving us steadily toward a culture of innovation. In working with my coauthors, we realized that BEANs were helping to “shrink the challenge” into micro shifts of change. The thoughtful introduction of BEANs into our way of working has fundamentally changed our approach to innovation and beyond.

As you embark on your own transformation journeys, remember that nothing will change unless the behavior of your people changes. Vision statements, knowledge, and logical arguments are not enough, yet we see many companies expecting people to be motivated into action based on leadership rhetoric alone. I would encourage you to embrace the ideas in this book to build creative confidence in your people and to gradually shift to the new behaviors required to unleash innovation throughout your company. Most people agree with Peter Drucker that “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” but very few companies have figured out how to systematically change a culture. This book sets out a powerful and proven approach. Just add tenacity, adaptability, and enthusiasm, and you, too, can succeed.

Natalie’s Parting Thoughts

I have the distinct privilege to both advise clients (including Patsy Quek from Paul’s team at DBS) and to be responsible for implementing culture initiatives at Innosight (with chief talent officer Kady O’Grady’s unwavering support and openness to new ideas). Because of my dual role, I have a deep sense of empathy for how much work it is to shift a culture. I continue to be impressed on a daily basis by how inspirational my colleagues and clients are and how many ideas they have. That said, they do cautiously hold back these ideas. This is where unleashing innovation and coaching comes in to set goals, identify what’s getting in the way—real or imagined—and put a plan into action. I am excited for people to get started on this work to unleash innovation in themselves, their teams, and their organizations. And I bet you have done more than you give yourself credit for. This is what my colleague Annie Garofalo and I discovered about most people when we captured the innovation stories of The Salvation Army Eastern Territory and the Innovation Factory.

So my advice is to take stock of what you’ve done and give yourself credit. Get started with the practical advice in this book, whether it is a BEANstorming session or even something smaller. Immerse yourself, bring others along with you, and have fun. This is important and highly enjoyable work that positively impacts how you and your colleagues spend your days together. It is estimated we spend 90,000 hours over the course of our lifetime at work, so why not make the most of them?

Andy’s Parting Thoughts

I have been fortunate in my career to have spent a significant time working on every continent except for Antarctica. I have also been fortunate on these travels to serve clients across myriad industries. The human connections this has afforded me, and the exposure to different organizations and their cultures, has been a great source of professional energy. Contributing to this book has prompted me to consider what a culture of innovation really feels like and to reflect on the different organizational cultures my travels have allowed me to experience. Above all, I have seen that the behaviors we outline in this book are universally applicable—across geographies, industries, and types of organizations. I have seen that the approaches described in this book really do enable high-performing teams to deliver better outcomes in all corners of the world, including the corner I currently call home—Singapore. My primary contribution to this book has been to summarize the work Scott and I undertook for Innosight’s Singapore-based client, the Singtel Group. That effort helped me to understand that a culture of innovation is not verbiage we use to describe ourselves, our department, or our institution, but it is, more fundamentally, the way we get things done every day and the reasons we choose to do them that way.

Creating a culture of innovation does not have to be an aspirational and esoteric thing; it is eminently practical. I encourage anyone with a passion for improving the way your institution creates value to take a practical approach and start by removing culture blockers. If you start with blockers, the people around you will more readily agree they exist and, more than that, will thank you for removing them! Start by identifying the top two or three culture blockers in your team or department and design practical ways to remove them using BEANs, as described in these chapters. Don’t stop there. Make sure you go further to engage colleagues to create, test, and refine your BEANs using the tools in this book. And remember, by engaging your colleagues, you will flush out those first followers who will transform you from a lone nut into the leader of a culture movement that will make creativity an everyday habit in your organization. Once you have had some success removing blockers, turn your attention to BEANs that encourage the specific behaviors you believe will have the greatest impact in your organization. This will ensure your movement gets momentum. And who knows? One day you may end up the hero of a culture change story that others will readily study and write books about, as we have done here with Paul and DBS. Good luck to all the lone nuts. But, remember, it is the first followers who create a movement, and that is a role everyone, in all organizations, should aspire to take on.

1. 1. This was the thesis of Scott’s 2012 Harvard Business Review article “The New Corporate Garage,” which profiled Nick Musyoka (from chapter 6) and other “corporate catalysts.”

2. 2. If you are still with us, stick around for the appendix. There are more good things in there!

3. 3. We miss you, Rahul!

4. 4. We miss you, Elliot!

5. 5. The postcards can be accessed at https://innosight.app.box.com/v/COIPostcards.

6. 6. This is chapter 2 of this book—which maybe you, dear reader, read in February?

7. 7. The team lost a tough game to Perth, which took them out of the running for the championship, and ended up losing the third-place game against a scrappy Doha squad. Why Doha, who flew almost 4,000 miles to get to Singapore, was in a “regional” tournament is a different discussion topic.

8. 8. A note on Teddy. His obsession in February 2020 was the traditional lion dances done to celebrate the Chinese New Year. The best $30 his parents ever spent got him a lion-dance costume. Much hilarity ensued.

9. 9. Whether, it must be noted, in a post-COVID world, going home is a physical or virtual act.