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Make Room for Innovation: A Framework for Creating a Culture of Innovation, with Lisa Bodell, Founder and CEO, FutureThink, and author of Kill The Company
I have a group of trainers that are located around the world and we teach people about innovation and change. And the very things that most companies put in place to help us better innovate or embrace change, so meetings, reports, policies, procedures, unfortunately people were putting so many of those things in place, they were putting a chokehold on change and innovation. So our conjecture around Kill the Company is what you need to do first before you innovate is get rid of the things that aren’t working, challenge the way things have been done before so you can make space for things to work better.
Embrace change
We don’t realize how much we resist change on a regular basis. A lot of people are becoming risk averse because so much is on the line. They are skeptical because the unknown is obviously more frightening than the known. And you can ask people, when you give them new ideas, what they think about that idea and most times, nine times out of ten, people’s reaction will be able to tell you what they don’t like about the idea first before they can tell you what they like. So shifting the mindset to seeing possibilities, what could happen versus what’s wrong with something, keeps an idea alive. And that’s very important in terms of getting people in the mindset for change. Don’t shut something down before you give it a fair chance.
Often when we look at problems as very big, very large, and that’s because we have a lot of assumptions about that problem. And we teach people how to break down a problem and attack those individual assumptions and turn them on their head. If you can actually take your assumptions and change them, you can start to see again more possibilities for change.
“Kill your company”
How you would go about killing your own company; you can do it on an ongoing basis. There’s always a good time to get rid of, especially if you feel like your company is at a stalemate; it’s standing still; you’re not able to be very innovative; the culture is not very innovative. But it’s really powerful just before your annual strategic planning. Because what you’re doing is kind of cleaning house before you start adding on more. And what you do with Kill the Company is you get the heads of your business units, you break into small groups and you ask each of those groups to focus on who their number one competitor is. You can decide as a group how to do this or if you have a mixed group each table can decide, but you have to pick who your number one competitor is. That company that you envy the most or are most threatened by.
And then you actually start to take on that competitor’s persona and look back at your own company and try and kill it over the next 30 minutes. What you want to do is take a look at every part of your business and where it can be attacked. From procurement, from operations to the products to the management and figure out where are you weakest. And then what you do is in the second half hour or hour that you have, look at that list, pick your top five that you think are the most critical, important, easiest to do and turn them back onto your competitor. So what you’re doing is identifying your own weaknesses and figuring out how to get rid of those, and then also figuring out how to turn them back onto your own competition. There’s ways that you can also organize the results you get from killing your company on a continuum from least likely to most likely to figure out what you should focus on first.
Overcome change fatigue
Everyone has change fatigue. And the reason for that is most change initiatives simply don’t work. And we wanted to go about in a new way. So we tested all kinds of things from tools that were amazing to techniques that were horrible and failed, but what came out of the research that we did was several companies over many years, but one intensely over eight weeks was this: change cannot be put on people. The best way to instill change is to create it with them.
The second thing is that change of course has to be supported from the top down. It must be supported from the top down. But where change happens is from the middle out. So the people that are sitting in what you do every day, which is meetings and emails, the people that are doing those things every day, more then they’d like, those are the ones that are going to be creating the change; they’re the ones that have to be empowered to do it.
The final thing is change can’t be complex. We have to work on simplifying. So from my perspective and at my company if there’s a tool that we have that takes us more then an hour to teach you, we should be fired. We should only give you simple tools that every layer of the organization can use and get on the same page with change.