The Innovation Showdown - Maslow vs Robbie Williams

Isn’t our own human nature infuriating – most of us have an innate desire and drive to build for ourselves, over the course of our adult lives, a cocoon of security.  This cocoon will be physical, monetary, emotional and psychological and act to protect us – it fulfils the need to “settle down”, “make things comfortable” and create a “safety net” for ourselves, our families and our enterprises – Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in action.  At the same time this very layer of protection can make us inflexible, unwilling to change and vulnerable to unpredicted changes in our circumstances and environment.  It also effectively kills off the felt “necessity” that is the “mother of invention”.  This is not good for innovation.

This observation is, of course, not new - the anthropologists, historians and psychologists have been studying the effects of this cocooning and the subsequent traumatic rebirths on civilisations, institutions and individuals for many hundreds of years (revolutions, paradigm shifts and mid-life crises).   So the idea of regularly embracing change and upheaval in order to survive and thrive in difficult times is well known (think Kaizen) and a proven strategy for success – think Apple and Steve Jobs.

Given that this is the case it never ceases to amaze me how many businesses fail to make the big leadership decisions required to invest in innovation and change when hard times arrive.  Instead most opt to batten down the hatches, put their heads in the sand and pray, effectively assigning themselves to the waste bin of history.   In essence – investing in innovation in a down turn is deeply counter-intuitive and deeply difficult but is nonetheless absolutely essential.   Unless an organisation wants to die slowly like the fabled frog in the saucepan of slowly heating water it must find leaders who are prepared to take the necessary risks, challenge the “perceived wisdom” of the cocoon, eschew the desire to retract and retrench and instead spend their efforts and energy on reaching out for the new.  

The irony is that most initially gung-ho leaders subscribe to the “succeed or die trying” maxim until the possibility of “dying trying” becomes a very possible outcome at which time the wisdom of the cocoon becomes overwhelming, the expansive rhetoric disappears and the hunker-down actions are mandated.  So what are us frail leaders, who hanker after the courage to make the difficult decisions, to do? 

Well the only thing I can see from my experience is to practice the art of deliberately and regularly lifting ourselves out of our comfort zones – make a deliberate act to take stock of our own levels of comfort and to ask ourselves if there isn’t some new challenge we can create in our lives.  This does of course require great effort and energy and flies in the face of the innate desire to build our comfort cocoons.  It does in fact require an almost zen like dedication to personal development and the discomforts of growth.  This is far from easy and at my current age I am deeply conscious of the lure of the cocoon but am keen to avoid jumping into it until I’m actually ready to die – after all a cocoon is just a coffin of our own making and in the words of Robbie Williams "I hope I'm old before I die."

So how do innovators tip the odds in Robbie Williams favour?  From what I have observed those innovators that still "have it" beyond the age of 30 are those that have practiced the art of pushing themselves, continually.  If we can practice this habit when we are not in deeply difficult circumstances we are in with half a chance of being able to successfully perform when our lives, businesses and countries encounter major upheaval.  My advice is to get yourself a provocative mentor or coach – not one who will act as a therapist, but one who will push you and not let you rest in your comfort zone.  You won’t necessarily enjoy the experience but it might keep you out of the cocoon and closer to the edge for a little while longer.

Snakes on a Plane - How to pitch an Innovation

Over the last month I have been working with a tech start up team looking at how best to bring a new product to market.  This has meant getting deeply involved with the team who have sweated blood and tears to build a product that has masses of potential.  Listening to them and getting right under the covers of the product has been a lot of fun and very energising.   However, what has been really interesting has been the debate and discussion we have had about how best to bring the product to market.  

Now as a student of the “art of pitching” I am a huge fan of the idea that the winning concepts are those that can be simply communicated in a way that creates a compelling mental picture in the minds of the audience – think of the eponymous pitch for the movie “Snakes on a Plane” – in 4 words you have a pretty good idea about what the potential film is all about.   It’s a genius pitch – shame about the movie.   So surely the task I should be helping the team work through is the creation of a simple, creative and pithy statement that sums up the product.  Well yes, but...

What has become clear as we have debated our go-to-market plan is, that for the product to be effectively launched, we need to be able to communicate its merits to several key audiences (not just one) – each of whom have very different motivations for engaging with the product.   We need to be able to engage our potential end users, we need to be able to engage our current and future investors and we need to be able to engage the CMOs and CIOs of medium sized corporates.  In effect we need to be able to explain our product simply in three or four different “languages” – languages that resonate with each of the audiences.  The need to be sensitive and adaptive to the diverse motivations of the different audiences is something most innovators only discover through the bitter experience of making an impassioned pitch that is met with bland indifference.  Too often innovators fail to get their product to market because they cannot think beyond the exciting tech they have created.   The reality is that most of the people you want to buy, invest in, or support your product really don’t care about the technology – they care about what it will do for them.

I have seen many pitches that have failed – not because of a poor product, but because of an inability to talk about the product in a way that lights up the audience it is being pitched to.   If you are pitching to potential investors they want to hear about how they will get a return on their investment (the money, the plan, the competition, the team) not how the technology integrates seamlessly with legacy systems.  If you are pitching to end users they want to know how using this product will enhance their lives (making it easier, cheaper, sexier etc) not how the user experience is configured.   If you are pitching to corporate clients they want to know what the product will do for them (their careers, their profits, their sense of control etc) not how much development time went into the coding.

So, in conclusion, when pitching, could all budding innovators and entrepreneurs please take the time to think about the audience they are pitching to and amend their pitch appropriately.  This simple tip cannot guarantee you avoid disappointment but it will massively improve your chances of at least getting your key messages across.

The Innovation Has Landed – What Neil Armstrong Can Teach Us About Delivering Innovation

Unsurprisingly, following the death last month, of a deeply unassuming Neil Armstrong, a mini outbreak of moon landing nostalgia has been released.   Now I am really not a space geek, but, having been born in the 1960’s, I can’t help but get caught up in the emotion surrounding the Landing of the Apollo 11 crew on the moon.  Now, whilst I love the romance of the “it’s one small step...” speech what has really caught my imagination and interest is the less well known story of the moments prior to touchdown.

Due to a computer malfunction, the Lunar Landing Module was steering itself away from the designated landing area towards a boulder-strewn area outside the originally planned “landing ellipse”.  (And this is the old school bit I really love) By looking out of the windows Armstrong realised the imminent danger and acted.  With alarms ringing out in the craft, Armstrong took semi-automatic control of the Lunar Module and with Aldrin calling out altitude and velocity data, landed at 20:17 on July 20 with only about 25 seconds of fuel left – thus salvaging the landing.

So what does all this have to do with Innovation?  Well, earlier this week I was having lunch with a previous mentor of mine who had just retired from a global technology services company having held the reins on Innovation there for the last 5 years.   What was fascinating was, as we compared notes, we both conceded that often the hardest part of successfully delivering Innovation is what we called “the last few metres”.  Just like Neil Armstrong we concluded that the best planning in the world cannot ever quite perfectly prepare you for the conditions you meet when trying to “land” a new innovation with its new user base.

Both of us were able to recount story after story of disasters, narrowly averted disasters and damp squibs that were down to the inability of the innovating organisation to manage the change and engage the user base with the new technology, operating model or product.   Many of you will remember the debacle of the launch of Heathrow’s Terminal 5.  Terminal 5 is now a fabulous, modern, slick airport terminal but its launch was massively blighted by huge failures in its security and baggage handling capabilities when it first opened.  The assumption was that everything would just work.  It didn’t and chaos rained, costing those involved some considerable sums of money.  Now T5 is an apocryphal tale but, from our sharing, we can utterly attest to the fact that week in, week out firms are wasting the money they have spent in design, development and testing by failing to manage the final implementation and user uptake.

The funny thing was that it wasn’t that people hadn’t thought about delivering the appropriate marketing, training, retooling or effort required to generate user uptake – it was rather that they just hadn’t done anywhere near enough of it at the right time.  We all seem to have a natural tendency to underestimate both what and how much it will take – in terms of effort and cost.

So, to those of you who are trying to deliver big, innovative, transformational changes – please, please, please do not scrimp on the “last few metres” and make sure you have enough support to land your innoavtion or repent at your leisure.

Thankfully for NASA, the USA and mini space nuts all over the world, enough contingency was built in to the landing protocols to avert disaster and we can remember with fondness the life and times of Neil Armstrong – still teaching us how to land 40+ years on.  Thanks Neil.

Perfecting Innovation in a Digital World - Simon Cowell, Will.i.am and the X-factor for technology

This month the press have been covering the soon to be launched “X-factor for Geeks” – the new TV concept being sponsored by the self-confessed technophile Will.i.am and the entertainment mogul Simon Cowell (see links below).  The idea, whilst still clearly in development, seems to aim to do for the unknown entrepreneur, building gadgets in their garage, what Simon Cowell currently does for would-be singers, crooning into a hairbrush in their bedrooms.  

Now the cynics amongst you are possibly thinking – “TV train wreck - Won’t this be a bit like running a junior Dragon’s Den – but with groovier music and lighting?”   Well, it may turn out that way but I don’t think it will.  Here’s why. 

One of the biggest and most commonly reported issues that my clients report to me when they are trying to deliver innovation is this – “How do I carry out cost-effective User Acceptance Testing on my prototype products at a large enough scale to be conclusive.”    This is a tricky and very real problem for most businesses – but not for Simon Cowell.  His formula for the modern TV talent show is the absolute pinnacle of genius when it comes to doing massive, cost-effective user acceptance testing.  At its simplest, he creates a showcase for his talents and then invites the millions of potential end users, via digital channels (texts, phone, apps etc), to pay to provide their assessment of the talent they are reviewing (genius).   Now there is an awful lot more to it than that but, you can bet your bottom dollar that when the new Geek Factor show is aired, at the heart of it will be a version of this grand scale, money making, user acceptance testing.

So, what can the rest of us, who don’t have our own TV empires, do to tackle the Innovators conundrum of running cost effective user testing at scale.   The answer is that we need to think like Simon Cowell and learn the lessons from the cleverly engineered processes behind his talent show formats.   Over the last 6 months at Capgemini we have poured major effort and brainpower into deconstructing and then reconstructing the process of Innovation to be able to create a cost-effective process that delivers a reliable flow of innovation.   What we concluded was - we need to “think like Cowell” and see the innovation process as a “production”.   We needed to design and build a scaleable Innovation capability based on the production company concepts that sit behind the current plethora of Saturday night talent shows.

And... after many months of designing, prototyping, piloting and testing the good news is that we at Capgemini have now successfully created our own Innovation production service that utilises a plethora of the new digital media to keep costs low and outputs high – we even think we have cracked the problem of conducting cost effective, large scale user acceptance testing.  Hurrah!

Ironically what is both gratifying and a little irritating for us is that whilst we’ve been looking at the entertainment industry for inspiration on the process of business innovation; Will.i.am and Simon Cowell have clearly been looking at business innovation as the subject matter for their next entertainment venture.

So, if you are struggling to drive innovation within your own organisation and would like to discuss further how this innovation production service could work for you and you don’t have Simon Cowell’s phone number then please do get in touch.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19799707

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9578273/Simon-Cowell-and-Will.i.am-to-launch-hunt-for-new-Bill-Gates.html

Unleashing a winning spirit - the search for Seve

Throughout the long summer of 2012 those of us who live in the UK have been treated to an unprecedented cornucopia of sporting excellence and delight.   Bradley Wiggins wins the Tour de France, Team GB excel at the Olympics and the Paralympics, Andy Murray wins the US Open and now to round it all out beautifully the European team mount one of the greatest come backs of all time to regain the Ryder Cup.  Wow! 

I've loved it all and have revelled in the shared sporting euphoria that the country has dined out on during some very difficult economic times.  Of course, as a student of "performance" I have also been inspired to get my head around the factors that have created this athletic prowess.  What is clear, is that the factors that deliver success are many - current physical fitness, coaching support and training regime, physical capability, access to facilities and personal desire - and then there is the strange, powerful, unpredictable "winning spirit" that can galvanise a team or an individual to perform at new levels of intensity and flow.  But what releases this longed for, willow the wisp spirit and transforms a good performance into a truly outstanding one? 

At times the spirit can be catalysed by the passionate support of a partisan crowd (witness the performances of the GB athletes in London 2012 and the performance of the USA golfers on the first two days of the Ryder Cup).  At others it can be catalysed by the desire to "do it" for a departed parent or friend (witness the European golfers inspired to perform by the memory of Seve Ballesteros and Gemma Gibbons the GB judo player who did it for her Mum) and on occasion it is catalysed by the desire to "deliver for the team" (witness Ian Poulter the heroic Ryder Cup golfer and Derek Redmond the team GB 400m runner who often seemed so much better in the relay than in the individual event).  Interestingly, on closer inspection, the nature of these diverse catalysts share similar properties - they have an external focus, are rich with meaning, emotional and supersede the sport - these are what seem to be the crucial elements for unleashing the winning spirit. 

Of course the challenge to me as a business leader pondering this is clear.  How do I uncover the catalyst for unleashing the winning spirit in my business?   I want to see the Olympian spirit released in my teams and my business - to do it I need to identify the external, meaningful and emotional themes that the people of my business can recognise and respond to.  I need to find my organisations very own Seve to guide and inspire us and unleash more of our winning spirit.  Of course, the joy and frustration of it all is there is no formula I can follow and the catalysts will need to be constantly changed or reinvented if the spirit is to be regularly released.  It is a beautiful paradox that makes the living of life an excitement and a joy.  It is, however, far more than just an esoteric musing – it is the Number 1 job of the leader - a business imperative that far too few of us fail to see and rise to.   To fail on uncovering these themes is to fail on bringing motivation and meaning to our businesses and teams.  For me life is too short to waste it on mediocrity and barren professionalism - I love being part of something inspirational.

I'm going to enjoy looking for our own Seve...

Mind the Digital Gap – Why we all need a touch of Digital Patience

Far from feeling alienated and overwhelmed by the digital world I continue to throw myself into it with passion and abandon.  I am a fully signed up and reasonably competent, Ipad, Iphone, twitter, facebook and linkedin user.   I love the fact that I can access all manner of services at the touch of a screen and that the world is seemingly at my fingertips.  I love it.

However, I have noticed a bit of a challenge that arises from this ubiquitous use of technology and the promise of instant wish fulfilment that it engenders.   I and my digitally enabled clients, colleagues and friends get unreasonably frustrated if we can’t get an instant result from our technology and whilst this is understandable I’m not sure it’s actually reasonable.  Ironically the faster our digital networks, devices and software run the greater the gap becomes between our expectations of what should be possible and what is actually capable of being delivered in the digital world.  In the last two years I have noticed more impatient, unrealistic and in some cases just outrageous stances being taken by a number of our under pressure clients when it comes to delivering digital solutions to their complex business problems.  Quite frankly, when it comes to digital transformation we are all in grave danger of allowing our digital expectations to get way too far ahead of the digital delivery reality.

Let me illustrate.

Quite rightly, due to its massive research programme with MIT, Capgemini Consulting is seen as the leading consultancy in the delivery of business transformation in the digital world.  This is great news but it comes at a price – the associated expectation of providing instant digital solutions to deeply complex business problems. 

Twenty years ago a successful business transformation programme would have a number of phases – an “as-is” diagnostic phase to clarify what the current state of play is, where the real challenges lie and what the levers for change are, a “to-be” phase that lays out the new vision, design principles and target operating model and finally a “gap analysis” phase that lays out the change journey from the “as-is” to the “to-be” state.  Simples.  

Today the underlying process of delivering a successful digital business transformation is actually still the same but the strange thing is that as soon as you attach the word digital to the concept of transformation it creates a set of “digital speed” expectations that are hard to meet – such as – “Why do we need an as-is phase, we all know what the problems are, surely you can just access my data and tell me what’s going on?  I thought you guys did big data? Why do we need a to-be phase – we all know we just need an app and a bit of a marketing push – let’s not over complicate this – we already know which technology we want to use.  And finally – there’s no need to overdo the change management – the new apps and technology will all be user friendly – let’s just get going and put something in.”  

Now, whilst there are some really good challenges in these comments for us as consultants and whilst we at Capgemini are running ahead of our competitors in the “digitisation” of our  diagnostic capability, delivery methods and delivery speed it doesn’t alter the fact that the delivery of digital transformation comes with its own unique challenges – many of which are caused by a growing expectations gap.  I seem to constantly have the nagging warning of the old proverb “act in haste, repent at leisure” playing at the back of my head when it comes to helping clients negotiate the complex issues associated with delivering meaningful digital transformation.   I also now hear regularly of “digital disasters” where well meaning, but under pressure clients have tried to break all the accepted wisdoms associated with business transformation on the grounds that it was a "digital project" and they have subsequently spectacularly failed to deliver on the desired outcomes.

One company, under intense delivery pressure, recently launched a world-beating digital application for purchasing financial instruments.  It was slick, it was fast and it was clever.  But, as a customer, if for a range of good reasons you didn’t match a specific profile then you’d be rerouted into the old manual process, which was far from slick.  You went from digital dreams to analogue nightmares!  Customer experience disaster.  Ouch.

The solution.  Easy to say, difficult to do – but I’ll be working with my clients on the concept of “digital patience”.  The digital revolution is here and delivering fabulous new capabilities but we must mind the digital expectations gap and realise that sometimes a little time to think and plan is a good thing in a digital world as no-one wants to repent at leisure.  So take a deep breath, display the right measure of digital patience and let’s set up our digital transformations for sustainable success.

Why I love the London 2012 volunteers...

This blog is inspired by the 70,000 games makers who gave freely of their time and energy in support of London 2012.  Top job – you have made us all very proud.

When I think about how excellent the London 2012 volunteers have been it really does make me spontaneously smile.   So as I sit here basking in the final few days of London 2012 I feel compelled to look at why it is they have had such a notable effect.

It is now a fairly well known fact that the concept of volunteers supporting the Olympics was first introduced at the 1948 London games.  In 1948 the UK was still experiencing rationing as part of the economic hangover from the Second World War and was compelled to use volunteers to ensure it could put the Games on.   Fast forward 64 years to 2012 and the concept of Games volunteers is established at the heart of the Games management process.  No Games functions without them.  So why have we all been so particularly touched by them this time round?

Strangely I can’t help but think that it has something to do with the overall economic climate and global social uncertainty (traces of 1948).   As many of us face personal financial difficulties, compounded for some by the increasing challenge of finding work and living on reduced means, our levels of stress and isolation rise and our baser instincts come to the fore (remember the London riots of 2011).   We were plugged into a potentially dangerous cycle and the country braced itself for further civil unrest.  Then, into the midst of our consciousness, during this time of anomie, step the values and performances of the Olympic Games and those beautiful, willing volunteers.  An army of cheerful, helpful and ubiquitous superstars – steering us, guiding us, offering us support and advice whilst keeping our spirits up.  It’s been brilliant and it’s been freely given.  The result is that a seed of hope arises within us, that, when difficult times come our way, there are actually many people out there amongst our neighbours who have the grace and courage to help.  We are not alone.

At the risk of falling into Olympic induced hyperbole we are lifted by the simple act of time given with a great attitude.  And the really powerful thing for us all to get our heads around is that these volunteers are not some super race – they are us, our neighbours, our friends, our colleagues.   They are not angels – they are ordinary people.

So as I reflect on London 2012 and the legacy it leaves I am deeply thankful for the volunteers and their simple act of giving their time for free.   My hope is that we have inspired a generation.  Inspired them to participate, take part and give freely of themselves – as opposed to the desperation, alienation and sense of entitlement that fuelled the riots.

So much as I want to say bring on Rio, let's move on.  I'd also like to raise us all a mini-challenge that says we can keep the spirit of London 2012 going here in the UK if we continue to reach out and volunteer - our country needs us.  If we try it we might enjoy it - I have a feeling the volunteers loved every moment.

Go Team GB