Relevant BEANs

Our innovation definition consciously uses the word different versus new to remind would-be innovators that there is no shame in borrowing inspiration. As Steve Jobs once said, “When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.” Full BEANs that help to foster creativity appear in table 6-1; partial ones appear in table 6-2.

BNP Paribas

INNOVATION BOOK AND AWARDS

One way to help innovators is to make it easy for them to collaborate, not just with other innovators but with other ideas.

For example, BNP Paribas, a financial services company based in France, has a BEAN to help stoke curiosity and provide stimulation for innovation. Every year, BNP collects innovative and creative projects that have been led by its teams throughout the world. The top ideas are compiled into an innovation book that is distributed to the company—and winning innovators are flown to Paris and awarded in front of the entire company. Imagine you have pinpointed a problem worth solving but are struggling to come up with a solution. No problem! Pick up the innovation book and flip through its pages. Odds are high that you will get some kind of useful stimuli.¹

Toyota

A3 REPORT

One barrier often blocking collaboration is overly complex communication that leads to team members talking past each other. A BEAN that can break this barrier and encourage productive collaboration is inspired by Toyota’s A3 Report. The report is named for the single eleven-by-seventeen-inch paper on which it is captured. The report captures the most essential information (the objective, analysis, an action plan, and expected results) to solve a problem on a single sheet that can be disseminated widely. Since it is a single sheet, language must be succinct and clear. And ample communication about and use of the report serves as a corporate-wide nudge to encourage further use. In fact, this BEAN is so embedded in Toyota culture that it passes the basic test of a habit: people do it without conscious thought. Simple ways to capture and communicate ideas helps them to spread and encourages collaboration.²

Partial BEANs

One of Amazon.com’s stated goals is to be the world’s most customer-centric company. Its Empty Chair ritual helps to reinforce this mission, as it is a powerful reminder that the “most important person in the room”—the customer—isn’t physically in the room.³

Many ideas get shot down before they ever get blueprinted. Retailer Nordstrom borrows from improv comedy by encouraging the use of “Yes, and …” during meetings. In other words, be willing to share what you don’t like, but have a solutions mindset where you either highlight other good parts of an idea or seek to improve on the identified deficiency.

Pixar has a number of BEANs to help it continually be creative (one is robust enough to be featured as a BEAN booster on the next page). Its physical infrastructure, with immense open space that connects to individual workspaces, encourages collaboration. Jobs, who was Pixar’s chair when the building was constructed, insisted it should encourage employee collisions that bring about unplanned collaborations.⁴ Another practice Pixar follows is called “Plussing.” Criticism at its meetings can be brutal. Rather than randomly critique a sketch or shoot down an idea, the general rule is that you may only criticize an idea if you also add a constructive suggestion. Hence the name plussing.

BEAN Booster: Pixar’s Braintrust5

In an industry characterized by dizzying swings between blockbusters and busts, Pixar Animation Studios stands out as an anomaly. Since the introduction of Toy Story in 1995, the organization has had an uninterrupted string of more than twenty critically acclaimed hits.⁶

What really makes Pixar’s story fascinating, however, is what happened in 2006. That was the year Pixar chair Steve Jobs agreed to sell the company to Disney, whose animation studio had been struggling. Most people assumed that after the sale, Disney would shut down its own studios, whose history traced back to Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse sketches, which launched one of the world’s most iconic companies.

But that’s not what happened. Pixar CEO and cofounder Ed Catmull and his team believed that they had decoded the formula for managing the process of creativity. They set a goal of reenergizing Disney’s animation team by applying a set of principles. If you have seen Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Wreck-it Ralph, Tangled, or Moana, you have seen the demonstrated impact of that intervention.

The brilliant book Creativity, Inc., by Catmull and Amy Wallace, details the Pixar approach. While the entire book is worth reading, the appendix beautifully summarizes the approach in thirty-three bullet points. Some of the choice suggestions include the following:

• Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. If you get the team right, chances are, they’ll get the ideas right.
• It isn’t enough merely to be open to ideas from others. Engaging the collective brainpower of the people you work with is an active, ongoing process. As a manager, you must coax ideas out of your staff and constantly push them to contribute.
• The first conclusions we draw from our successes and failures are typically wrong. Measuring the outcome without evaluating the process is deceiving.
• It is not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them.
• Don’t wait for things to be perfect before you share them with others. Show early and show often. It’ll be pretty when we get there, but it won’t be pretty along the way. And that’s as it should be.
• Our job as managers in creative environments is to protect new ideas from those who don’t understand that, in order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so-greatness. Protect the future, not the past.

One of the key mechanisms Pixar has to support these ideas is the “Braintrust” it forms to guide the development of a movie. The Braintrust is a small group of some of Pixar’s smartest and most creative people. Directors working on movies show very early ideas to this group, not to earn praise or platitudes but to experience sharp critique that ultimately results in a much better movie. The Braintrust is not a decision-making body but a mechanism to emphasize candor and to creatively challenge the production team.

One of Catmull’s persistent points is that every movie that Pixar has ever made, at one point in the process, “sucks.” The Braintrust, Catmull notes, helps Pixar go from suck to non-suck.

“Its premise is simple: Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems, and encourage them to be candid with one another,” Catmull explains in Creativity, Inc. “The Braintrust is one of the most important traditions at Pixar. It’s not foolproof—sometimes its interactions only serve to highlight the difficulties of achieving candor—but when we get it right, the results are phenomenal. The Braintrust sets the tone for everything we do.”

As he returned from the wrap party for Frozen 2, Catmull, who retired in 2019, reflected on the importance of providing candid feedback to directors: “The wrap party for Frozen 2 was my thirty-second wrap party in my time at Pixar and Disney. One thing I can count on is that every director, including the very best, loses objectivity in their film. They don’t particularly want an outside voice hitting them with a two-by-four, but without it, they would not succeed. And, while the directors initially don’t want the outside voice, they have learned to value it.”

Case Study: Scott and Brad’s Excellent Adventure

Every year since 2007, Innosight has held at least one gathering, bringing together senior leaders from companies it has served and (truth-in-advertising) companies that it hopes to serve in the future. A typical CEO Summit has a social dinner, followed by a full day of facilitated discussions with content from academics (Clayton Christensen, Rita McGrath, and Roger Martin have all appeared as speakers), CEOs, and Innosight’s leadership team.⁷

Intuit founder and chairman Scott Cook is the only non-Innosight person to have come to four summits. Now a founder-led company might seem to violate the principle laid out in the introduction of focusing on normal organizations doing extraordinary things (NO-DETS), but Intuit is a middle-aged company (founded in 1983) that is publicly traded, Cook is an unusually thoughtful corporate leader who stepped down from his CEO position in 1994, and, let’s face it, financial-management software isn’t the world’s sexiest category.

Soon after Cook and the board appointed Brad Smith as Intuit CEO in 2008, Smith, Cook, and the rest of the leadership team set a goal of building a deep capability around design thinking. Behind the charge was the observation that the number one reason people bought software packages like TurboTax and QuickBooks was their ease of use, and the number one reason people didn’t buy the software was … their (lack of) ease of use. Cook believed that the principles of design thinking, such as forming deep empathy for customers, developing boundary-pushing solutions, and rapidly testing and iterating ideas, would help Intuit continue to thrive in an increasingly competitive world.⁸ The effort worked. Intuit’s stock price surged, and, in 2017, Fast Company named Intuit as one of the top ten most innovative companies in design.

“The headline of the story makes it sound easier than it was,” Cook said during the panel “Culture Change that Sticks and Scales” at Innosight’s 2018 event. In 2014, he said, leadership noted that its “Design for Delight” program wasn’t having the impact it had hoped. The company had taught its top people the concepts of design thinking and had created a team of coaches and catalysts to augment that teaching (that team is one of the BEANs featured in phase 4), but the behaviors had not yet become habits. So, Scott and Brad set off on their excellent adventure.⁹

Leader role-modeling is a staple of any kind of change management process. That can be a real challenge for leaders seeking to encourage innovation habits, because those habits are probably least familiar to them.

“The top execs have to change,” Cook said in the panel discussion. “It is their habits that drive the company, and it is their habits that are the barriers to change.”

How can you help seasoned senior leaders learn new skills? Cook’s advice: “Learning by doing, by everyone.” It is well documented that “lean-back learning” is not an effective way for adults to learn, an idea that calls to mind the Mark Twain quip that a lecture is the quickest way to transfer information from the instructor’s notes to the student’s notes without passing through the brain of either.

Cook learned that the best way for leaders to make the transition was to get them to experience the new ways of working firsthand. So Intuit’s top twenty-five leaders formed groups of three and performed foundational research on predetermined topics such as changes in finance in China, artificial intelligence, and young people’s interactions with computing. “The leaders in the case were actively driving the discovery process,” Cook noted. “They couldn’t delegate it. A number of them wanted to delegate to their teams because that’s what they do. But not in this case. You had to do it yourself, which means you had to be on the plane to China.”

Of course, changing twenty-five people doesn’t change the culture; hence, the “by everyone” part of Cook’s advice. He described how US auto manufacturers struggled for decades to decode the Toyota production system (also described in phase 4). “If you send one guy to see the new process,” Cook said, “and that guy gets all excited and comes back and tries to teach the other ten thousand people, it never works.” So preceding a major company meeting, Intuit had all 8,000 people “take a day to do our innovation process from the beginning of understanding the customer problem all the way through to designing the experience,” Cook said. At the meeting, the teams would then bring in what customer problems they observed and work on developing solutions.

Clearly, having Cook and Smith (and Smith’s successor, Sasan Goodarzi, who took over in early 2019) personally participate in these kinds of efforts sent a strong signal that no top leader was above the effort, which helped Intuit achieve its effort of entrenching habits related to design thinking deeper into the organization.

“Learning by doing, by everyone,” brings another benefit: It helps to raise collective intuition, which improves the ability to make decisions about uncertain ideas. Rather than sitting in a cushy conference room reviewing PowerPoint slides, leaders should get out and experience the raw data by participating in experiments and joining group problem-solving sessions. Hands-on experience not only demonstrates deep commitment but also allows leaders to observe things that otherwise would be hidden. After all, summary reports always contain biases and interpretations, and sometimes the most important things are the anomalies and surprises that get buried in appendices, if they appear at all.¹⁰

Case Study: Innovation at the Intersections

Once you have found a problem worth solving, the next step is to come up with an idea. This is where it gets hard, right? After all, you have to be a creative genius to “think outside the box.” But not if you follow Pablo Picasso’s famous mantra: “Good artists copy; great artists steal.” You shouldn’t literally steal, of course. Rather, you should borrow an idea from one context and bring it to another. Brilliant borrowing is the best way to short-circuit the path to successful innovation.

That’s exactly what Fiona Fairhurst did almost twenty years ago when she was tasked by Speedo to come up with a swimsuit that allowed athletes to swim faster. While it would be natural to think that the best way to do this would be to cut down the suit’s friction, Fairhurst framed the problem differently. Where in nature, she asked, can I find something that is big but goes through the water quickly? She studied a shark. Sharks are huge but can reach speeds of up to thirty miles per hour in short bursts. And it turns out sharks don’t have perfectly smooth skin. They have something called denticles, which essentially propel them through the water. Fairhurst’s nature-driven inspiration led to the Speedo Fastskin, and, well, you know the rest.

Alternatively, consider Nick Musyoka. In 2008, Musyoka was hired by Swiss agrichemical giant Syngenta to develop a strategy to crack into the smallholder market; smallholders are small, usually family-owned farms. With 500 million smallholders around the globe, the opportunity looked huge—and hugely challenging. After all, Syngenta’s sweet spot was massive, professionally run farms that invested heavily in automation and other tools to boost productivity. Smallholders generally live hand-to-mouth and could rarely think beyond the next growing season. The good news was that Musyoka had already seen the solution to the problem—not at Syngenta but in his previous job working for the global consumer packaged-goods giant Reckitt Benckiser. In the 1980s, shampoo and soap companies pioneered a model where they increased sales in poorer countries by selling affordable single-serve “sachets” and investing in grassroots education. Musyoka incorporated that concept into the Syngenta program launched under the name Uwezo, which means “strength” in the native language of Kenya. Instead of buying a big bag of chemicals, farmers could buy a single packet that they could pour into a twenty-liter backpack. Syngenta commissioned close to fifty field agents to travel on motorcycles to teach famers about the benefits of crop-protection chemicals firsthand. Within two years, the program was up to close to $10 million in revenues in just Kenya, which represents a mere 1 percent of the global smallholder market. That’s brilliant borrowing!

You can do the same thing that Fairhurst and Musyoka did. Once you have found a problem worth solving, find someone or something that has already solved your problem. Look in different categories and fields and remember the time-tested idea that magic happens at intersections, where different mindsets and skills collide.

Tool: Discovery Question Cheat Sheet

One of the quickest ways to learn how a company really thinks about innovation is to be a fly on the wall during its budget discussions or project reviews. Those are magic moments where words are given to often unstated assumptions. It happens when leaders draws in their breath and then speak. Do they make declarative statements? That could signal a company suffering from what Google calls the HIPPO problem, where decisions are based on the highest-paid person’s opinion.¹¹ Do they ask thoughtful questions? That could signal an environment that tolerates collective exploration of the unknown.

“A company grows to reflect its leaders. The questions leaders ask are really important,” Cook said during the 2018 panel discussion mentioned previously. “We had to make sure we were asking the questions that insisted and evoked the behaviors that we were teaching. Questions like, ‘What experiment are you going to run next week?’ If they don’t have an experiment planned for next week, let’s talk about that. If they have a proposal, we’ll ask, ‘What experiments did you run that prove out the leap of faith assumptions?’ These are all the things we teach, but if we’re not asking for it, if we’re looking at the spreadsheet and saying, “That looks good,” and are not asking for how they got to the answer, we’re not teaching and reinforcing the same behaviors.”

The question “What experiment are you going to run next week?” is an example of what we call a discovery question, which encourages dialogue and opens possibilities, versus a delivery question, which forces a decision and narrows choices. Another way to frame the distinction is that discovery questions create possibilities, while delivery questions demand proof. You can prove the past, but you need possibility to create the future.

Next time you are in a meeting to discuss an in-process innovation initiative, consider asking one of the following seven questions:

1. How might we do it differently?  Being curious starts with the belief that there is always a better way to do things. Simple questions like “Why?,” “Why not?,” and “What if?” function in similar ways.
2. What is the job to be done?  This question helps to reinforce the notion of being customer-obsessed and avoids the trap of developing a solution to a nonexistent problem.
3. Who has solved this before?  This question leads you to the intersections, removes the shame of borrowing ideas, and reinforces the idea of smart collaboration.
4. What would we need to believe?  Uncertain ideas can’t be assessed purely analytically. Adeptness in ambiguity involves zeroing in on the key assumptions that would need to prove true for a desired outcome to occur.
5. What don’t we know?  Another key part of being adept in ambiguity is being humble about the limits of current knowledge. This question role-models humility and accepts that there will always be limits when doing new things.
6. What did we learn?  This question further encourages being adept in ambiguity by moving away from a myopic focus on outcomes (which happens when you ask questions such as “Did it work?” or “Did we hit our targets?”). Beyond commercial success, there are three valuable things you can learn from an experiment: you can learn what won’t work, you can develop a strategic option by learning that something will work only when other factors exist, and you can identify the opportunity to pivot to a different and better idea.
7. What are our options?  This question helps to reinforce the notion of empowerment, with a leader shifting from asserting the answer to inquiring about possibilities.

In 2009, Natalie and Scott worked with the top leadership company of a $1 billion apparel company seeking to boost innovation. Historically, the company had consciously sought to avoid innovation. Rather, it followed a classic fast-follower strategy, waiting for someone else in its category to demonstrate the viability of an innovative idea and then seeking to replicate it at a lower cost. That strategy was running out of steam, however. One fundamental challenge was that leaders had spent years honing the craft of diving into details with probing delivery questions. Early-stage rough ideas crumbled under this kind of scrutiny.

To help them change their behavior, we created a “cheat sheet” that leaders could refer to in meetings about nascent ideas (displayed in table 6-3). Consider giving leaders a version of this as a way to encourage a more discovery-oriented mindset.¹²

1. 1. One of our former colleagues used a similar approach when seeking to develop new ideas. He would flip through historical versions of the Sears catalog. With a good problem on his mind, the catalog often provided surprising inspiration.

2. 2. The companion website to Scott’s book The First Mile has two such idea-capture forms: a short “idea resume” and a longer “mini-business plan.” See www.innosight.com/insight/the-first-mile.

3. 3. One thing we wondered about in the midst of COVID-19-related lockdowns is whether virtual meetings at Amazon have an empty chair, a cardboard cutout of a customer, or some other reminder to reinforce this idea.

4. 4. Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs said that Jobs insisted on having a single bathroom for the whole building in the central atrium. Because everyone has to go to the bathroom, he reasoned, this would force chance collisions. The management team raised the practical implications (and limitations) of the suggestion, however, stopping the idea in its tracks.

5. 5. We debated about whether to include this as a BEAN or a BEAN booster. It does appear in the appendix’s bag of BEANs, but is profound enough that we thought it worth discussing more extensively.

6. 6. Okay, Cars 2 did get a 39 percent rating from Rotten Tomatoes (the next lowest score of a Pixar movie is 70 percent). But Happy Harry (see chapter 2) gave it two thumbs up, so there’s that!

7. 7. 2020 gatherings, not surprisingly, were held virtually.

8. 8. Note those principles mirror the behaviors we detailed in chapter 1. While the words are different, the basic concepts overlap quite tightly.

9. 9. Yes, that’s a reference to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, the movie that kickstarted Keanu Reeve’s career. The writer that picked the subhead had no idea that a revival was in the works in the midst of the drafting of this book. Crazy times.

10. 10. Scott Cook has a lot of quotable quotes about innovation. He told Natalie the idea of “savoring surprises” when she interviewed him in 2008, describing how QuickBooks’s growth traced back to a surprising market research insight. Scott Anthony’s favorite Scott Cook quote is, “For every one of our failures, we had spreadsheets that looked awesome.” Indeed.

11. 11. Another animal Paul has heard exists inside some organizations (but, no longer in DBS!) is a ZEBRA: zero evidence but really arrogant.

12. 12. This is so BEANable. Anyone want to rise to the challenge?