Dealing with Innovation Blockers

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Ever get excited about an idea and have it demolished, shot down, blown up, ridiculed, or just ignored? Here are a few of the innovation blocker personas you might find in your workplace, and a few ideas to get around, jump over, or jedi mind-trick them.

The Bureaucrat builds consistency, and sets limits to ensure rule adherence, but has gone a little overboard. This persona’s favorite quotes include “Has this been approved?”, “Fill out this form,” or “That’s not in this budget cycle.” Any organization that aspires to scalability and developing size beyond the fun start-up phase, requires a level of protocol and operational systems thinking, which necessarily means implementing processes and procedures. Everyone in such an organization can’t simply “wing it” on their own personal path to developing innovation. However, the Bureaucrat has gone too far.

Here are a few tips for working with the Bureacrat:

  • Prepare before going to them. Write down what you believe you need and be as specific as possible. You won’t be able to anticipate all of the red tape and paperwork, but you can probably predict much of it. Compile all of the evidence and information you think you might need and have a paper trail to back up your efforts.
  • Participate in the process. Don’t be content if they say they will get back to you. Ask what steps they need to go through and then request to participate in the process. Because you are the primary stakeholder, we may be able to chase down information faster.
  • Check in. They might give you a vague answer like, “It takes between five and ten days.” Tell them you will check back in five days, then do it. Your punctuality will send a message you expect the same from them. To them, your persistence will elevate the importance of your project.

The Wimp Sponsor is a project champion who lacks attention, interest, or clout and whose favorite lines include “Can you rework the business plan on this?” and “Let’s study this some more.” Forever terrified of social risk, and losing political capital, your Wimp Sponsor is either unable or unwilling to champion your efforts. Consumed with cowardice, these impotent and ineffective sponsors need to be identified and addressed from both above and below.

  • If you work for a Wimp: Take the initiative. You aren’t likely to get permission or have them ask you to take action. Remember they’re a wimp, so be proactive. Take the first few steps in your initiative and report on your progress. The Wimp isn’t likely to ask you to stop or retrace your steps. They just don’t have the courage to ask you to move forward because they don’t want to be responsible for your actions
  • If you manage a Wimp: Create specific targets and deadlines together, but let them lead the way. Wimps often know their weakness, and it’s best to allow them to state out loud what they believe needs to be done. Ask them these simple three questions: “What are you trying to accomplish that requires more than just you? Who would be the best people to help? What stands in your way?” By answering those three questions out loud, you will help the Wimp build their own accountability and publicly take the first step in developing a successful project initiative.

The Power Monger believes power and resources are more important than results. The Power Monger has already achieved some level of power and status. Favorite quotes are “I’ve already thought of that,” “I’m already doing that in my group,” and “Hope you can do that with your own people.” The Power Monger operates from a viewpoint of scarcity. They believe there aren’t enough resources to go around and it’s important to hoard and protect assets and information.

  • Start with praise. The Power Monger is likely to be sensitive to criticism and to reject new ideas. The first step is to use gracious, yet authentic, flattery. False flattery, although effective, propagates a dishonest work environment. Find areas of excellence in this power hungry person and give them honest and direct praise for it.
  • Use the power of suggestion. There is a famous scene in Star Wars in which the young Luke Skywalker and his mentor Obi-wan Kenobi are at a guard check point in a land speeder. The Imperial stormtroopers are in search of droids that are with them, but Obi-wan uses a Jedi mind trick to make the stormtrooper in charge believe and say, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for…. He can go about his business.” The power monger needs to feel as if the idea came from them. Instead of dictating or directing your ideas, pose them as questions.

Bureaucrats, Wimps, and Power Mongers are common foes to the innovation champion. But remember this before you go looking to ID these people. Start by assuming the best intentions of everyone around you. Whether meek, powerful or simply pushing paper around, when we first assume the best of people they will often rise to the occassion and reveal the best version of themselves. Expect the best and back it up with a good offensive strategy.

Change the Aspirations, Change the Outcome

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Be the change you wish to see in the world
– Mahatma Gandhi

Let’s just agree – just for the moment – that your company cares more about your own personal and professional development and livelihood, your family’s health and well-being, your local community’s civic integrity, the broader environmental impact of the company’s footprint, building a positive value chain in which stakeholders at all points of inflection on your product’s journey from cradle to biodegradable rest are supported, and even weigh decisions with a long-view lens with the expectation that decisions today have immense brand-impact downstream – and cares more (or at least equally) than making a profit. If this were true, your company’s incentive and value system would reflect an expectation that you would contribute on these dimensions in proactive and meaningful ways. You might be expected to take time to exercise or attend conferences and workshops to develop your own physical and mental capacities. There might be some peer pressure to talk more about the difference you and your team made in developing sustained customer value, rather than high-fiving fat commission checks and bonuses. There might be some big initiatives measuring your team’s contribution to civic well-being. What we measure is what we get back in return. In other words, what we persistently ask questions of, we grow, develop and achieve toward those inquiries.

CLIF Bar CEO Gary Erickson founded CLIF in 1992 with partner Kit Crawford with a vision to make a great-tasting, healthy, organic snack bar, and while they did achieve this, meanwhile Gary’s mind kept drifting to the places that inspired him and the employees of the company: where they rode their bikes, where they spent their free time, and the communities and beautiful country they lived in. As a result, CLIF doesn’t have one bottom line, they have five. They measure their success against Five Aspirations. While constantly being adjusted and refined by the employee community, CLIF is measuring their success based on how well they are doing against their Five Aspirations they have set forth for themselves:
• Sustaining the brand
• Sustaining the business
• Sustaining the planet
• Sustaining the people
• Sustaining the community
How these metrics are valued remains up to the employee community to define, and yet are discussed, debated, and edified in writing such that each associate understands the stated metrics on how CLIF will evaluate performance against these values. To pursue these goals, employees might organize their colleagues to support their own local charities, or collaboratively measure their progress at the gym, or maybe share details of the time and energy they’ve devoted to coaching little league.

Sure, we do this now in our own lives. And then when talking to colleagues, and the reactions are often, “Good for you, how do you find the time?” because implicitly the professional expectation is that performance is measured against contribution to profit. If you have any time for time to make considered and thoughtful decisions by taking a break and trail-running with your dog, …well, that’s just because you’ve already fulfilled the profit punch-list, you’ve already fed the hungry maw of fattening investor equity. CLIF has empirically demonstrated that by sustaining (and measuring) not only the business, but also other dimensions targeted at driving human and social and community and environmental value, companies can prosper successfully on multiple dimensions.

Rick Warren reminded me years ago that the etymology of integrity is from the Latin integer, which means “wholeness” or “oneness.” When we give ourselves and our colleagues permission to bring our whole selves to work, we can begin to achieve, and define, our success against metrics far greater than shareholder value and company profitability. Consistent studies reveal that when we place progress in meaningful work as our paramount motivating factor, then cultures thrive, mood states elevate and companies profit all the more.

Would your product really be missed?

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“In category after category, companies have gotten so locked into a particular cadence of competition that they appear to have lost sight of their mandate – which is to create meaningful grooves of separation from one another. Consequently, the harder they compete, the less differentiated they become…Products are no longer competing against each other; they are collapsing into each other in the minds of anyone who consumes them.”
– Youngme Moon, author of Different

Several times in my life I have been a part of creating and launching successful and original products. And each time we’ve never paid much attention to what anyone else was doing.

The first successful launch was in 1993, when my father Hal had a crazy notion to take content experts into television studios and broadcast live their classroom presentations, and use phone and fax machines for interactivity. Insane. Who would do such a thing? Who would buy it? He very nearly conjured the idea out of thin air. He reasoned that instructors could reach more audiences using television technology, and people with satellite dishes would pay for learning at a distance. Reasonable extrapolation, but it wasn’t modeled against an existing business he knew of.

After over a year into the effort we were contacted by companies and groups who were creating (or had created) just such a learning service. As you might imagine, since we never “benchmarked” ourselves against what anyone else had done, we were busy making our own mistakes. With persistence, and many mistakes, it worked. We still create live, satellite-delivered (well, mostly webcast-delivered) presentations today.

The first colossal failure came when we did try to copy what another company was doing. We discovered after a few years that there were entire digital satellite networks dedicated to delivering learning content. National Technological University (still exists but the network folded), PBS, The Business Channel (ran out of funding), RTN Group (folded, and yes, that domain is for sale…), had all ventured into the business of building real-time digital satellite networks and failed. We figured we would win because we were smaller, faster, more nimble, could operate more cheaply. All of these things were true. The problem was that no matter how cheaply we could deliver the service, it didn’t matter because no one was buying.

The problem with head-to-head competition now is that since the technical ability to emulate and copy someone else is so easy, it’s hard to differentiate. In an earlier time, companies could develop a proprietary platform, technology, or capability, and lead with that advantage for some time, possibly years, before anyone could catch up. Now, technology is the great equalizer. Whatever you can dream up, someone else can copy. And if you follow this treadmill, it leads inevitably to feature explosion and product augmentation. The trick is to do something your competition isn’t willing to do. The trick is to take that chance that no one else is willing to take, precisely because it hasn’t been tried. Only if you are willing to wildly fail, can you wildly succeed.

Harvard professor Youngme Moon, in her book Different, describes those products and companies that learn to thrive in this world of easy equivalence, as those companies who are willing to swim against the tide of incremental improvement and feature addition. She describes these successful products as “lopsided.” That is, they accentuate what the rest of the pack is unwilling to emphasize due to perceived risk. The result of the copy-cat economy is that while product developers may be able to tell you the nuances that distinguish their products from everyone else’s, the truth is no one cares.

In the words of Jim Collins, the real question you want to answer is: If your company went out of business tomorrow, would anybody really miss it?

Treat books as conversations

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“John Adams’ favorite form of conversation was an argument. He thought that arguments were the only form of conversation that really forced you into truth”
– Joseph Ellis

Over time we consistently find inconsistencies of advice. One minute we need a high-fat diet, the next it causes cancer. One decade we are advised to give out esteem trophies to every child who makes an appearance, the next decade we discover it curbs their appetite for hard work and continuous improvement. Most recently I engaged one top creative thinker who advised that team leaders should arrive at meetings with strict and clear agendas, ideally have only one clear decision to make as a team, and limit the meetings to 45 minutes. Five years ago I had an interaction with another business best-selling guru who advised team members should set the agenda during the first few minutes of the meeting, and the conversation should primarily be about information-sharing, which would naturally encourage team members to collaborate independently.

I’ve tried both meeting tactics and I’ve found that while neither are inherently wrong, I have developed my own preferences. Contrary messages are everywhere. I don’t believe in definitive models, but I do believe there are certain truths and value to be found in most ideas and conversations. If I read anything called “The Nine Immutable Truths of Success” or the “The Six Definitive Steps to Greatness” I react with deep skepticism, yet probably read it anyway because I’m curious and believe there are threads of value within.

Remain constantly inquisitive, and find the bits and pieces that resonate with you and put them to work. Many ideas and advice from credible sources are worth your energy and adoption to the point of realizing value. And then reach again to find, apply and reinvent again.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Incentivize Innovation that Escalates Me to We

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We do this constantly in our work: we figure out macros and hacks that streamline and accelerate our work. A routine we might perform numerous times a day, becomes a habit we learn how to tweak and accelerate and perform faster to increase our own performance.

But what if our organizational cultures incentivized people to conjure hacks and macros that accelerated the work of the team, of the entire groups we collaborate with?

I had an interview with the VP of HR for a leading consultancy in India. He described a practice there to incentivize bigger thinking innovation we can all emulate. If an associate there figures out a faster, cleaner why of performing a routinized task, they are acknowledged and rewarded. Their work gets better, and the entire team benefits from their elevated capacity.

However, if they develop an innovative new process which lifts the productivity of their entire collaborative team, the recognition and reward is significantly larger. Because now the defining mindset and orientation shifts on what innovation really means. Innovation is now cast in terms of lifting the larger whole, the greater goal and purpose. Instead of being defined as personal and incremental, innovation is recast as the opportunity and expectation that everyone will both think of themselves constantly as part of a larger we.

Here’s an example of that idea in practice borrowed from a fortune 500 financial services company that does just that in spades. I had a cool conversation with their IT leader who encourages professionals on the team to post internally their custom hacks and scripts to a social platform for others to copy and build on. The practice has spurred a friendly cooperative competition among the programmers to post and defend their own cool custom hacks. Then, other pros in the IT group are encouraged to borrow that brilliance and build on these signature scripts, which again elevates the productivity of the greater whole. It encourages personal, creative expression, and it builds a shared network of signature solutions within the group.

Figure out how to not only recognize and incentivize individual creativity and productivity, but also create shared solutions that support everyone around them.

You don’t have to buy them: The Collaborative Investment

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I had a conversation today with a VP of Human Resources at one of the largest, and still fastest growing consultancies in India. He described a practice of accelerating innovation you can borrow today, which they have already shown to work in their business.

In the new frictionless economy, in which innovation in product and service can emerge from everyone, everywhere and for everything, not only do we need to bet on the creative innovative collaborations of the people within our own organizations, but we can also tap into the creative surge of small, nimble, companies without the deep formality and commitment of either acquisition or equity capital investment. Right now, there is a flood of new startups entering the world market. You don’t need to risk a stack of money to buy and leverage their expertise. Instead, build the “collaborative investment.”

Stay curious and open to those emerging small (even really small) businesses which show promise in delivering new market value, and cultivate those relationships, as both direct customers, and on a quid pro quo basis to stay ahead of the innovation curve. You might currently hold a leading market position, yet innovative ideas and solutions can come from all quarters of the market. And since the next killer app might notcome from inside your company, all the better reason to stay closely connected to emerging opportunities.

Here are a few ways you can collaborate with emerging businesses without formal monetary commitment:

Make visibility and marketing exchange commitments to the new partner
In this capacity, you have the power to recommend and refer existing customers to small companies showing promise, representing immense new opportunity for the small company, yet maintain a “watch and see” position to learn how the market responds. The startup gains the visibility the much larger company can offer while you remains a tacit partner in the promotional effort. This collaboration can then be formalized over time as the startup gains traction. For favored customer status, or even for an inside look under the hood of the killer app you are using, you can offer market visibility that would be otherwise unavailable because of their size.

Make internal referrals
Whatever cool, efficient, valuable product or service the startup is offering, you can bet another group or another division in the company can equally benefit from their service. If you are responsible for a particular product development initiative, you are certainly aware of similar efforts, funded from separate budgets in your own company that might benefit from the external partnership. Bonus: your internal referral will not increase your customer favorability, but also fuel the innovation of the service itself because the new division working with the startup is likely to push them in different ways.

Find small, promising companies and get close to them. Figure out what you can offer that would be of great value to your smaller collaborator to help their innovation grow.

Balancing Global Vision with Local Relevance

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At the moment, Andrew Deonarine is a third year medical resident at University of British Columbia (UBC)  He has developed a passion for improving literacy in developing economies.  A few years ago after a trip to India he was inspired by the One Laptop Per Child initiative to improve literacy around the world.  And he wondered if there wasn’t an even easier and more ubiquitous platform for delivering literacy learning.

He is also a programmer and technology tinkerer.  With a curious mind, he developed a big idea to use simple cellphones to be a platform for distributing literacy learning through PhoneCasting – a push technology in which anyone can author a brief engaging learning script and push-cast it out to deliver simple reading and math literacy to potentially millions of people.  He calls it EduCell.

Inventive yes.  But how does anyone know about it?  They didn’t.  Until, he learns about an InnoCentive challenge.  He applies and his EduCell proposal wins.  He is in talks with Nokia to develop and deliver EduCell universally.  Through the innovation crowd-sourcing visibility of Innocentive, Andrew is changing the world.  From Ontario.

This is a wonderful story, and indicative of how fast innovation can move in this frictionless economy.  How important is speed to market?  Last year Jim Barksdale, formerly of Netscape, spent 300 million to dig a gopher hole from the Chicago Mercantile exchange 825 miles to the New York Stock Exchange to lay direct-line fiber optic cable.  Why?  To gain 3 milliseconds in speed of trading information.

Competition is emerging from everyone, everywhere, and for everything – and one thing is clear:  Our most powerful competitive advantage is in the hearts and minds of all the people throughout our global organizations, and we must unlock these capacities.  Gone are the days when we could just buy diligence and expertise, and ask people to execute on the strategic bets of a very few in the corner offices.  Now, only by tapping into those discretionary qualities of initiative, creativity and passion – that cannot be bought at any price – can we build the competitive value of the future.

Bruce Churchill, president for DirectTV Latin America, said the key to the 300% market growth was to remove the corporate directives from NYC and Miami that decided how and when and where their services were deployed in Latin America, and instead give autonomy and discretionary decision-making authority to the local operators.  Who knows better than the people who live in Bogotá, Rio, and Caracas, the culturally relevant TV programming to provide, how to price it, the marketing that would make it stick in each locality.

Michael Byrne, president of Linfox, the biggest shipping and logistics operator in Australia said the key to their remarkable growth in India, Thailand, Vietnam, China and throughout southeast asia over the past ten years has been specifically because tap into the talents and give localized control over operations.  With over 2400 employees in India, and as of my conversation with him last year, Linfox had exactly one Aussie ex-pat working there – and he’s not the boss either.  By first providing a clear and singular vision of commitment to safety, excellence, product integrity and quality, Linfox provides the shared vision and values that provide the bedrock of the company, and then gives trust and operating control to the local markets for culturally nuanced execution.

Those organizations that learn to balance global unified vision with local relevance are those that will thrive in the new creative age.

You Make Your Own Luck

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Friday afternoon I stopped by our local convenience store to gas up. When I went inside, I was surprised to find a sizeable line of people to buy megabucks lottery tickets. I knew about the lottery since it was plastered everywhere but had yet to encounter the fever pitch first hand. The drawing for 650M was in a few short hours. Showing the same wildly irrational hope, I bought a few tickets.

We don’t have much control over whether we win the lottery, but it turns out, we have control over what we perceive as “luck,” and we have a great deal of control over our own happiness by how we interpret events and situations. When events occur we choose whether we believe they happened to us, or we caused them to happen. Bronze medal winners consistently self-describe themselves as happier with the result than Silver medal winners. Because they are not celebrating the facts, but interpreting counter-facts. They are answering the what-if question, and Bronze medal winners are celebrating that they are on the podium, while Silver medal winners are disappointed they lost.

Here’s another example of how we look at the world. In Daniel Kahneman’s book, he describes a bank survey in which they asked two separate questions:

  • How much would you pay for $100,000 life insurance that will pay in the event of death for any reason?
  • How much would you pay for $100,000 life insurance that pays in the event of death by terrorist attack incident?

Survey respondents said they would pay much higher rates for the second type of life insurance. This is deeply irrational but speaks directly to how negative emotions and ideas have the ability to cause us to overvalue or over emphasize their likelihood because of our emotional response to the idea.

In Richard Wiseman’s book The Luck Factor, he describes luck in terms of choice. In his research working with over 400 individuals he found some key attributes of those who describe themselves as “lucky.” These are the four big points in the book:
They consistently have chance encounters that lead to interesting new possibilities and opportunities
Lucky people harness the power of curiosity well. They are creative and curious, and everyone can learn to be too. Wiseman has a fun game you can play in which you write down six activities or experiences you have not tried but would be willing. Write them down and then roll a die and go do it.

They make good decisions without consciously knowing why or how they did
Those who describe themselves as lucky make better gut decisions. Which seems impossible to control, yet Wiseman discovered this is a learned trait since he found that those lucky decision-makers actually spent more time reflecting and meditating on the decision once considered, and spent more time envisioning hypothetical circumstances they might have to decide on. So when the situation arose, those lucky were better prepared to make a decision in the moment.

Their dreams and ambitions have a knack of coming true
Lucky people expect the best outcomes, despite any negative past experiences, whereas unlucky people allowed past negative events to dictate future expectations. The lucky people also described their expectations of upcoming interactions with other people as generally positive.

They regularly turn their bad fortune into good luck or opportunity
Wiseman describes two primary ways people turn bad luck into good. Basically they interpret the bad as “could have been much worse.” And when they reflect, they spend a greater amount of time visualizing and selectively remembering the positive. Other words, the bad wasn’t all that bad, and the good was pretty great.

The #1 Motivator in the World

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I know. That title is a big call. Not to worry, we have Teresa Amabile, author of The Progress Principle, to back us up. I was fascinated and enthralled by her work and book when it came out early in the fall 0f 2011, and just one week before meeting her to collaborate on an event, I made the following mistake: I was conducting a workshop with 86 senior executives and asked them Teresa’s question in a quiz-format:
Rank-order the following employee motivation factors:

  • Recognition
  • Incentives
  • Clear goals
  • Progress in the work
  • Interpersonal support

    • Most people in the room chose Recognition, then Interpersonal Support, then Clear Goals, then Incentives and Progress last. Seven people chose Progress. Less than 10%. Perfect right? Since this is my opportunity to share Teresa’s work and illuminate the truth that the #1 motivator is a sense of progress. More specifically “progress in meaningful work.”

    This was supposed to be the moment of ah-ha, the moment of illuminating insight, but instead there were a lot of frowns, and after a beat one executive raised her hand to say, “But without Clear Goals, progress is meaningless. Clear Goals must be the most important.” I couldn’t stop myself and said, “Yes, you are speaking from the perspective of the team leader. You know and understand there must be clear, actionable goals in order to make progress. But the question was ‘What is the most powerful motivator of the members of the team?”

    Teresa and her colleague Steven Kramer analyzed 12,000 diary entries from 238 employees in 7 companies to come to the qualified conclusion that the most valuable work motivator is indeed, a sense of progress (in meaningful work). And even though I knew from her research that only 5% of leaders surveyed understood that, still I persisted in pressing the point.

    When I met with Teresa, she said she didn’t present her findings in such a “gotcha” format because of that very reason. And her goal was to spread this important message until the needle pushed way past 50%, and then perhaps she would try it in a quiz-format.

    Two take-aways:
    1. The #1 motivator for contributors is progress (in meaningful work)
    2. Never ever make your audience feel stupid

    When sharing insight with anyone – either personally one on one or in a large group – allow people to feel like they have come to the insightful conclusion on their own, and build their own insights to apply to their work. Make people feel stronger, smarter, better-equipped to propel their team and drive innovation.

    Don’t save Par, make Birdie

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    “You don’t know how strong you are, until being strong is the only option you have.”

    There’s an old adage that suffering yields ingenuity. The list is deep of artists, innovators, and inspiring leaders who found strength in the depths of adversity. It’s a beguiling truth since we tend toward safety and risk aversion in most aspects of our lives and business. So the question becomes, “If we aren’t currently in the depths of adversity, how do we find deep creativity and inspiration within contentment?” Or a better question might be, “How do we intentionally perturb ourselves in the search for creativity and inspiration?”

    Statistically it’s true that golfers become better putters when faced with making par versus making birdie, from the same distance, with the same lie. We have surety and conviction when attacking the status quo, and make poorer choices when reaching beyond ourselves to excel, even when the goal remains the same. When we are on the edge of social risk, we retract, concede, and assimilate back to the norm – we make par.

    Try this:
    Choose between getting $900 for sure or a 90 percent chance of getting $1,000.
    A. Getting $900
    B. 90 percent chance of getting $1,000

    Choose between losing $900 for sure or a 90 percent chance of losing $1,000.
    A. Losing $900
    B. 90 percent chance of losing $1,000

    See below for the analysis, but the answer is clear. If you, like most people, chose A and then B, you could well be $100 down at the end of this exercise. What’s your social risk tolerance? What’s your measure of personal need for gain?

    (Jamie Lalinde, Vanity Fair) The results of this simple problem set, for which most participants answer A and then B, were used to develop the thesis that would make Kahneman and Tversky famous: prospect theory.

    In a 1979 paper, they documented a peculiar behavioral tendency: when people faced a gain, they became risk averse; when they faced a loss, they became risk seeking. As a result of their discovery, Kahneman and Tversky debunked Bernoulli’s utility theory, a cornerstone of economic thought since the 18th century. (Bernoulli first proponed that a person’s willingness to gamble a certain amount of money was a product of how that amount related to his overall wealth—that is, $1 million means more to a millionaire than it does to a billionaire.)

    Along with playing a large role in Kahneman’s being awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002, the theory also spawned a new academic pursuit, the field of behavioral economics. Prospect theory, Michael Lewis writes, explains “why people are less likely to sell their houses and their stock portfolios in falling markets; why, most sensationally, professional golfers become better putters when they’re trying to save par (avoid losing a stroke) than when they’re trying to make a birdie (and gain a stroke).”