THE INVESTIGATE MINDSET

‘PAYING CAREFUL ATTENTION TO WHATEVER IS BEING STUDIED’

‘So, when you look at the data, what can you see?’ I asked a group of commercial directors in a professional services organisation as I presented their team profile on The Six ‘I’s of Innovation^®.

‘It looks like we miss the investigate stage altogether,’ replied one member of the team. ‘We just jump headfirst into implementation.’

‘Yes,’ I responded, ‘and why do you think that is the case?’ ‘Pressure for results,’ said one. ‘Activity is rewarded,’ said another. ‘No time to stop and think,’ said a third.

‘And what is the lowest attribute score in the team?’ I asked. They stared at the graphs of their team results.

‘Being able to make sure ideas are useful, not just novel,’ one woman said. The others nodded in agreement.

‘And what is the outcome of this on the quality of your products and services, and your sales?’ I asked. There was a pause. It was as if, in seeing the data in front of them, a fresh wave of insight came into the room and they realised that they were not spending enough time with customers; not just to sell to them, but to explore where new needs were emerging and whether the solutions they had on offer were what customers really wanted. They were not getting outside of their own ways of thinking. They were not exploring or testing. Yes, they had ideas, but they were not thought through value propositions based on real customer or market insight.

This is a very, very common pattern in organisational life. Thankfully, in this case, the conversation sparked a discussion, and ideas, on how they could involve the customer in the heart of their innovation process, helping the team to create new solutions that directly met their customers’ needs.

Being critical is often thought of as a negative behaviour, synonymous with being judgmental or accusatory. In fact, the word critical comes from critique and carries the sense of well-reasoned, articulate and in-depth examination of ideas or the quality of a something, not the thing itself. The essence, or mindset, that we want to develop is being objective, being able to stand outside of our own judgement so we can look through a microscope or a magnifying glass at what we have created and see how it could work. It is having the mindset of a researcher. This phase of innovation is about being informed, looking from different perspectives through deep analysis and assessment of what it is you are trying to create and being willing to test assumptions. You want to be the critic, a person who offers reasoned judgement. Critical thinking is an analytical skill, being thoughtful, asking questions, not taking things at face value and being willing to shift opinion as new information or insight comes to light.

This is not just about outsourcing to external research partners, although that may well be needed, depending on what it is that you want to create. This is about you, or your teams, spending time thinking through ideas you have so that you can develop them into propositions that will create value and have an impact. Do not outsource your eyes. Get out and meet customers, have the conversations, stand in their shoes and see what life is like from their perspective. Empathise with them and their needs. Think through the benefits that you can offer them and how can you deliver those benefits. Prototype, test, run small pilots or studies with small groups of people to see what might work, get feedback and enhance your offer. If you are using online technology, you have the benefit of being able to track how people are interacting with your service and gather instant feedback.

Think of ways you can explore and research that are appropriate to your innovation challenge and your cultural context. Many say they are scared to innovate because of the fear of failure. If you build in the requirement for failure at the investigate stage, people will know that it is OK to experiment, ask questions, explore and challenge. Articulating upfront that you expect many ideas to fail will save time, money and resources, because it is cheaper to fail during testing rather than to fail after full-scale implementation.

A useful question to ask yourself is ‘What does the idea need?’ It is not about you, it is about the success of the idea. The role of an innovator is to find out what the idea needs in order to move it forwards. Does it need more novelty? If so, go back to ignite. Does it need more testing? Go to investigate. Does it need resourcing? Go to invest. The skill, as you journey through The Six ‘I’s^®, is to notice when you need to shift your or your team’s thinking, particularly in the first three stages as you go back and forth between identify, ignite and investigate. At some point, though, you do need to make a decision, and this requires courage. This brings us to the fourth ‘I’ of The Six ‘I’s of Innovation^®, which we will explore in the next chapter – invest.

Ready to move on to invest? Revisit your Purpose, at the beginning of the book, and use this simple checklist to make sure you have covered some of the most salient points of investigate. How have your ideas changed?

To dig deeper into developing the skills and mindset, refer to the resources at the end of this chapter, but first let us meet Jacquie Ford, whose highest score on The Six ‘I’s^® is investigate.