Relevant BEANs

Acting empowered involves having an ownership mindset, in which you certainly seek guidance but don’t wait for permission to act. Full BEANs that help to support these behaviors appear in table 8-1; partial ones appear in table 8-2.

Toyota

ANDON CORD

A classic BEAN to encourage empowerment comes from Toyota. The key to Toyota’s long-term success is the well-studied Toyota Production System (TPS). Historically, manufacturers believed there were tradeoffs between quality, speed, and cost. Toyota showed that its approach, with a maniacal focus on continual improvement and waste reduction, could deliver against all three. While there are multiple pieces to the TPS, one key component is the Andon Cord. All Toyota employees are viewed as experts in their respective fields, who can stop the production line when they spot anything perceived to be a threat to vehicle quality. They do so by pulling on the Andon Cord. Not only does this ritual stop problems early, but it also shapes a culture of dispersed empowerment by encouraging employees to take ownership of production processes and to speak up when there is an issue.

Tasty Catering

GREAT GAME OF BUSINESS

Two blockers to empowerment are a lack of confidence and a lack of understanding of the full scope of what’s required to translate an idea into value. At a conference in 2011, Tasty Catering, a catering company based in Chicago, Illinois, discovered a unique way to help its associates understand more about business: play a game. The catering company had always believed in giving associates full visibility into the organization’s financials. Every week, they play a customized version of a game called the Great Game of Business. Each player makes a forecast for a line in the P&L. The projections are then compared with the actual figures. Winners are celebrated and deviations are analyzed, feeding into the organization’s overall efforts to identify patterns and to generate ideas for further boosting performance.

Spotify

BETS BOARD

A third interesting BEAN to help to take ideas forward is the Bets Board that digital music company Spotify uses to track key strategic initiatives at the company, division, and squad levels. Each bet is captured in a short brief that summarizes data around the bet, interesting insights that come from that data, beliefs spurred by the insights, and the bet itself, a framework that Spotify calls Data, Insights, Beliefs, Bets (DIBB). The bets board is a Google spreadsheet open to everyone in the company. It lists the name of each bet and the bet’s sponsor and “road manager.” A two-page brief further details the DIBB, stakeholders, and key success metrics. The bets board helps leaders to identify and prioritize projects, helps bets teams to focus on what they need to do to advance their ideas, and helps the broader Spotify community to know the company’s key initiatives.

Partial BEANs

We previously argued that, while people often say a lack of available time or adequate training inhibits innovation, the deeper blocker is typically the inertia of existing habits, which are intertwined with supporting processes and systems. If, however, you have overcome that inertia and have moved an idea forward to this phase of the innovation journey, a lack of time or inadequate training can indeed inhibit progress.

Making material progress with an idea requires that someone (and, often, many someones) spend significant time on it. However, most people have little slack in their calendars, and few organizations have legions of unallocated employees sitting at their desks twiddling their thumbs. Whether employees are engaged in the right activities can reasonably be debated, but it is generally true that there is not a lot of slack capacity to do different things.

Asana and LinkedIn have BEANs to give the gift of time. Asana, a work-management solution cofounded by Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz, has No Meeting Wednesdays to give employees uninterrupted time to work. LinkedIn has a ritual called InDay, where employees invest one day a month on themselves and their passion projects. The goal is for employees to have time to “invest, inspire, and innovate.” Each InDay has a theme chosen by a member of the executive team, and employees are free to connect their work to the chosen them, aided by “culture champions” distributed throughout the world.

Let’s say that people find the time to individually follow innovation behaviors. While innovation is a discipline, doing it well requires practice. To help spread skills through its organization, Intuit has dedicated innovation catalysts. Employees are trained as innovation catalysts and then spend up to 10 percent of their time coaching, mentoring, and inspiring employees in and outside their teams. Employees can ask innovation catalysts for coaching help on their projects and unstructured time. In turn, the catalysts are able to share and draw from the experiences and lessons they receive along the way.

BEAN Booster: Innoganda Busters

Remember the “inspirational” ideas box, with the rusted lock, from the introduction?¹ BEANs help to fight against what we dubbed innoganda. To support those BEANs, particularly in this critical phase of the journey, always remember to connect the dots. Chapter 3 referenced Steve Kerr’s management classic, “The Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B.” This is the folly that occurs either when what you say you want doesn’t match what you reward, or when what you ask people to do doesn’t fit with the underlying beliefs of the organization. A simple way to address this issue is to ask a basic question: If we do this, what else do we need to do to support our goal? Then to answer this question, consider and connect the following five dots.

If you ask employees to generate ideas, create mechanisms to do something with them.

Executives often get fooled by inspiring stories of engineers at companies like 3M or Google coming up with germs of ideas in the 15 to 20 percent of their time they allocate to side projects. If your organization does indeed have mechanisms to take idea fragments, process them, and turn them into fully fleshed-out innovations, by all means open up the idea spigot. Too often, however, you create the virtual equivalent of a locked ideas box. You generate a long list of ideas destined to never go anywhere. All this does is create substantial organizational cynicism. You don’t have to set up a standing department; you can simply develop a set of criteria by which to judge ideas and predetermine what you will do with the best ones.

If you ask for answers, define problems worth solving.

Innovation is something different that creates value. You create value only if you solve a problem that matters. Executives often think that the best way to spur innovation is to remove constraints and let hundreds or thousands of flowers bloom. Overly fragmented efforts result in nothing more than a lot of undernourished flowers. Constraints and creativity are surprisingly close friends. Problems can range from entering new markets to addressing everyday concerns such as making video conferences more engaging. Whatever they are, the more specific, the better.

If you want people to experiment, stock the laboratory.

Innovation success results from disciplined experimentation. Consider how the Wright Brothers developed the first flying machine. Step back in time about 120 years ago. The world was obsessed, the machine age was upon us, and the scientific revolution had passed. Yet we hadn’t solved a problem that had perplexed people for eons: birds could fly, but humans couldn’t. How did most would-be aviators approach the problem? They designed flying machines, gamely climbed cliffs, and jumped. The best outcome? Back to the drawing board. The worst outcome? No chance to try again.

The Wright Brothers framed the problem differently. Before they built a plane, they flew kites and gliders.² The great thing about kites and gliders is that when they crash—and they always do—no one gets hurt. Using a kite or glider is akin to creating a mockup or prototype. It is running a small test market before you launch or trying something yourself before you ask your team to do it. Perhaps even more critically, to optimize their kites and gliders, the Wright Brothers hacked together bicycle-spoke wire, a cardboard box, and a fan to create a wind tunnel that allowed them to simulate flying conditions. Imagine how it felt. Everyone else was working on crazy contraptions that were crashing, and in two exhilarating months, the Wright Brothers ran two hundred experiments testing thirty-eight different types of wing designs. Organizational equivalents of wind tunnels are models, simulations, and test beds—mechanisms to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of experiments.

Of course, your innovators need to have the materials to build kites, the space to fly them, and access to the wind tunnels. If they don’t—or if they need to get twelve approvals in order to do so—don’t expect to see much experimentation.

If you want big impact, allocate real resources.

Far too many companies create what you might call Potemkin portfolios. In the same way that Russian prince Grigory Potemkin impressed Catherine the Great with villages that were nothing more than facades, companies build beautiful ideas on paper without considering the resources needed to turn them into reality. Innovation is hard work. The vast majority of startup companies fail, and that’s with tireless dedication from a team that has everything to lose. If you don’t dedicate the right resources to your best ideas, you are consigning them to failure. At the very least, someone must have the idea’s advancement among their top three priorities. Otherwise, it is unlikely to happen.

If you demand disruption, ring-fence your resources.

The essence of Harvard Professor and Innosight cofounder Clayton Christensen’s famous “innovator’s dilemma” is that companies privilege investments made to sustain today’s business over those with the potential to create tomorrow’s business. Along some dimensions, this is quite rational. After all, a dollar invested in the existing business produces a measurable, near-term return, whereas a dollar invested in a nonexistent business promises ethereal returns at a difficult-to-pin-down future date. Of course, over the long run, that disruptive investment might be a better proposition, but if the company hasn’t set aside resources specifically to drive disruption, the short term will always win.

BEAN Booster: Innovation Amplifiers

Intuit’s implementation of innovation catalysts is a BEAN, but it also functions as an innovation amplifier. Below are eight types of amplifiers to consider.

Case Study: Scaling Innovation at UNICEF

If necessity is indeed the mother of invention, it should come as no surprise that UNICEF is a hotbed of innovation. The organization was founded in 1946 in the aftermath of World War II with a specific mission to provide food and healthcare to children in war-stricken countries. Today it is one of the world’s most global organizations, with more than 19,000 employees operating in more than 190 countries. Its mission is “to save children’s lives, to defend their rights, and to help them fulfill their potential, from early childhood through adolescence.”

UNICEF has always innovated, but over the past fifteen years, it has sought to innovate more purposefully and with higher impact. This shift traces back to efforts by Dr. Sharad Sapra in UNICEF’s Division of Communication in 2007. “We cooked up the opportunity to take a very minimal amount of funding and ring-fence a few people to think about problems differently,” recalled Tanya Accone, who was a strategic planner in Sapra’s division. “The intent was to carve out space and people to explore ideas. That’s where it began.”

Sapra moved to Uganda and repositioned innovation by bringing it front and center to UNICEF’s operations in that country. Accone described the innovation challenge Sapra gave the organization: “He said, ‘We’re not going to do anything we have done before, because if we do, we can just extrapolate the trend and things will continue. I want space to see how to create a hockey stick for exponential change.’ ”

As visitors increasingly came to Uganda to see the results of Sapra’s focus, it became clearer that UNICEF should take a more structured approach to innovation. In 2015 it formed the Global Innovation Center (GIC), which Accone now heads. The GIC is a globally connected team that is part of UNICEF’s Office of Innovation. The GIC helps to identify and scale promising in-market developments and to strengthen UNICEF’s overall innovation capabilities. For example, in early 2020 it released a turnkey innovation toolkit that leverages the services of the International Development Innovation Alliance (a collaborative platform formed in 2015 with the mission of “actively promoting and advancing innovation as a means to help achieve sustainable development”). The toolkit also provides expertise on demand, which can help in-market innovators to shape and scale their ideas both for their own market and, eventually, for others.

The GIC complements other UNICEF innovation enablers. A team in San Francisco, for example, works with startups and venture capitalists to help identify promising technologies that could help UNICEF deliver against its mission. Another team in New York acts more like a venture capitalist, giving grants to startup companies to help them further develop their ideas and execute in-market pilots that fit UNICEF’s mission, such as drone-based delivery of medicines in rural areas. Other groups develop innovative approaches to fundraising (clearly core to UNICEF’s mission) and supply-chain management.³ UNICEF firmly believes it is at its best when it collaborates actively with its ecosystem, where it seeks to “maximize shared-value partnerships with businesses while leveraging our core assets.”

Accone’s group has a global advisory committee that permanently includes its donors (the Government of the Republic of Korea; the Philips Foundation; and the UNICEF National Committees of Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States) as well as handpicked subject-matter experts, depending on the location and topic of a meeting. UNICEF’s convening power allows it to access leading experts, and its innovation infrastructure helps to ensure expertise flows to the right locations.

UNICEF’s innovation infrastructure is intentionally staffed with people who have diverse backgrounds. Of course, team members need to have experience in developing economies, but they mix relevant skills for their respective roles with new-to-UNICEF capabilities, such as data analytics, human-centric design, and business modeling.

Accone also noted the importance of having the right mindset. “There is a proverb that you can go fast alone but you can go far together. Our team needs to be humble, have a learner’s mind, and professional maturity,” she said. “You are going to deal with a range of pushback. You have to be the ultimate professional and take it.”

The GIC helps to strengthen in-country execution while also looking for opportunities to refine and scale programs that could work across multiple countries. “We can see actual programmatic problems that are being solved. Is that solution showing potential to be relevant and scalable because it solves the same or similar problems in many places?” Accone said. “What are the few things we put into the portfolio that we will then nurture to scale to dozens of countries?”

The foundational tenets below connect UNICEF’s innovation efforts and map very nicely to the behaviors that form the backbone of a culture of innovation.

1. We speak tech, design, and international development (curiosity and collaboration).
2. We believe that no one gets there alone (collaboration).
3. We’ve been doing this since 2007 and have a proven and ongoing track record of success and failure (adeptness in ambiguity).
4. We move quickly and take calculated risks on ideas that could change the game for children (empowerment).
5. Our work is driven by children’s needs in over 190 countries, especially the most marginalized (customer obsession).
6. We start small but scale proven solutions globally (adeptness in ambiguity).

Of course, driving innovation across a large, dispersed organization presents its challenges. As such, many at UNICEF conflate innovation and technology, (unintentionally) underinvesting in low-technology solutions that could go on to create tremendous value. In early 2020, UNICEF announced a revised innovation strategy with an intent to focus on digital innovations, physical product innovations, innovative financing, and program innovations to advance against identified social goals, such as providing access to clean water and education. There also can be a perception that if you didn’t come up with it yourself, it can’t be innovative, meaning there can be bias toward being the first country to do something small versus the twenty-third country to do something big. To combat this challenge, as part of its 2020 strategy, UNICEF announced a goal to have 80 percent of its innovation efforts focused on scaling and spreading ideas and 20 percent on ideating and shaping ideas. It also shared an “innovation ambition matrix,” which it would use to help categorize and manage the effort, and outlined the criteria it would use to “scrutinize and prioritize” innovation activities.⁴

These systematic and structural upgrades can only help advance UNICEF’s innovation efforts, which have already created tremendous value for children and constituencies. As noted in the GIC’s 2019 annual report, “Applying a demand-driven, centre-of-excellence model, the GIC has supported 85 countries to identify, adopt and adapt innovative solutions. To date, these new technologies and approaches have affected the lives of 115 million people across these 85 countries: directly used by 18 million young people, frontline workers and women, and bringing indirect benefits to a further 97 million children and their communities.”

Case Study: DBS’s Systemic Support

The companion case study to chapter 2 described how DBS fought the shadow strategy and transformed its culture. As we near the end of part II, let’s return to DBS to further explore the thorough and thoughtful way in which it has engaged in that fight. Yes, there have been catchy slogans and highly effective BEANs, but DBS has supported those efforts with the following:

CHANGED ITS OFFICE DESIGN.  Paul took over the real-estate portfolio in 2013. He admits that he completely underestimated the power of space in driving change. If you think about it, your behavior is heavily influenced by the space around you. For example, you behave differently in a library than in a supermarket. So DBS started to use the design of space as a powerful tool to encourage cross-team collaboration. DBS’s former office design had been based on the longstanding belief that people like to have their own desks, as it gives them a sense of belonging. But its hypothesis for its new space was that to create a sense of belonging, you needed to feel like part of a community—not feel attached to a piece of furniture. And a real community would lend itself to more collaboration. So, DBS designed a new kind of work environment. The resulting space became known as Joy Space, as a nod to DBS’s vision of making banking joyful. The space is open-plan with no fixed seating, and zones, ranging from the “Library” to the “Pub,” were developed based on type of work. The new space proved to be hugely popular.⁵ Team members started to invite colleagues and even families to tour the new space. But most importantly, DBS saw better collaboration across teams. Other departments began to request similar designs, so DBS began to roll the concept out across the company.

CHANGED CONSTRAINING POLICIES.  DBS has learned that relaxing policy can be a powerful way to send signals across the company and encourage empowerment. For instance, when it opened its new technology and innovation center in Hyderabad, its dress code policy was “You can wear anything you want, as long as it would not embarrass your parents.” The underlying message was “We have guardrails, but you decide.” DBS analyzed its corporate purchases and learned that most were for small amounts. Inspired by Netflix’s famous “Freedom and Responsibility” culture document that cascaded around the internet in 2009, DBS removed the requirement to get expenses preapproved.

It also developed a new approach to root out processes and policies that might have made sense at some point in history but outgrew their usefulness. DBS set up a special committee named after a self-deprecating Singaporean slang word, kiasu, which roughly translates to “behaving in a selfish manner due to fear of missing out.” The head of Legal and Compliance chairs the Kiasu Committee, which takes the form of a mock courtroom where any employee can “sue” the owner of a policy or process that they feel is getting in the way.⁶ The “jury” is made up of some senior executives but also some of the most junior people in the bank. They collectively deliberate over whether a change should be made. One of the first decisions was to remove the need for physical signatures for approval. The approach caused quite a ripple through the company and gave DBS employees confidence that their issues would be heard and addressed.

Tool: Zombie Amnesty

Do you feel like you don’t have sufficient resources to take promising ideas forward? It is possible that you have succumbed to a pernicious plague that can kill innovation energy: the plague of the zombie project. Do you have efforts that, if you are honest, will never have material impact but still shuffle and linger on, sucking the innovation energy out of your organization? If so, then a zombie amnesty, where you kill projects but pardon people, may be for you! Innosight’s fieldwork and the work of like-minded academics—most notably Rita Gunther McGrath of Columbia University (a certified zombie killer if ever one existed)—suggests six keys to success:

1. Predetermine criteria.  Shutting a project down can be very emotional. Setting and sharing a shortlist of criteria before the process begins can help participants to view the process as being as rational as possible. These criteria will be guidelines, not rules, as final decisions will always require subjective judgment.
2. Involve outsiders.  Parents can attest to how hard it is to be objective about something you played a part in conceiving.⁷ An uninvolved outsider can bring important impartiality to the process.
3. Codify reusable learning.  McGrath teaches that any time a company innovates, two good things can happen. Successfully commercializing an idea is clearly a good outcome. So too, however, is learning something that sets you up for future success. As seminal research into product failure notes, “knowledge gained from failures [is] often instrumental in achieving subsequent successes.” So capture knowledge to maximize the return on your investments in innovation.
4. Celebrate success.  Any time you innovate, future success is unknown. Therefore, learning that an idea is not viable is a successful outcome—as long as that learning happened in a reasonably resource-efficient way. Prospect theory holds that people hate losses more than they enjoy equivalent gains. Add this to a culture in which taking well-thought-out risks carries the potential for punishment, and it is no surprise that people hesitate to take risks.
5. Communicate widely.  Innovation happens most naturally at companies that “dare to try,” a conscious reference to the BEAN at Tata that celebrates failed projects (see chapter 3). Shining a spotlight on purged zombies naturally makes it safer for people to push the innovation boundaries.⁸ After all, if you don’t dare to try, how can you hope to succeed?
6. Provide closure.  This idea is ripped straight from McGrath’s excellent 2011 Harvard Business Review article “Failing by Design”: “Have a symbolic event—a wake, a play, a memorial—to give people closure.” Without closure, it is too easy for someone, somewhere to revive the zombie. The Supercell Cheers to Failure BEAN (see chapter 7) fits perfectly here.

Our experience is that, typically, almost 50 percent of a company’s innovation portfolio can be safely killed. Find and put the zombies down, reallocate resources to your most promising projects, and you will suddenly see your innovation efforts become bigger, better, and faster.

1. 1. Yes, that was many pages ago. But it was a good story.

2. 2. Today most innovation practitioners would call this a minimum viable product, or MVP.

3. 3. Fun fact: UNICEF is the world’s largest purchaser of pencils and vaccines!

4. 4. The specific criteria set is called “3S MI”: 3S refers to the three S-words solutionable (solves problems and does no harm), sustainable (has a life cycle and is upgradeable), and scalable (is easy to use and understand). MI stands for measurable (defines milestones and objectives) and inclusive (involves multiple stakeholders).

5. 5. Joy Space is a BEAN you can borrow and appears in the bag of BEANs in the appendix.

6. 6. The Kiasu Committee appears in the bag of BEANs in the appendix. One Innosight team member (who is Singaporean) expressed confusion over the name, however, saying kiasu is better used for instances such as when Singaporeans stocked up on instant noodles and toilet paper anytime there was a government announcement about COVID-19 in early 2020. For what it is worth.

7. 7. For example, Scott will attest his four kids are the cutest kids in the world. An outsider might point out flaws in Happy Harry. They would be wrong, of course.

8. 8. On the phrases “zombie killer” and “purged zombies,” one organization that Innosight worked with preferred to talk about transforming zombies into angels. It certainly sounds more pleasant than purging or killing zombies! We do purposefully call this a zombie amnesty to highlight the fact that the people working on zombie projects should be safe from punishment.