Digital: Disrupted: How Do You Define Innovation?

Episode Transcript:

Paul Muller: I imagine that so many of our Digital: Disrupted listeners know the word innovations almost always is used as a synonym for technology in a stuff. Apps and gadgets we can put in our hand. But today's guest challenged that with a slightly different spin. When we last spoke on the show, he put it as this, he said, innovation's about finding problems and then conducting experiments to determine a solution. Easy to say, but how do you make that a systematic capability versus the apocryphal eureka moment that we all think innovations associated with? Well, before we delve into the answer, thanks again to the Rocket Software for making today's episode possible. If you haven't already, do, check them out at rocketsoftware.com to see why over 10 million IT pros rely on them every day to run their most critical business apps, processes and data. Well, welcome back to another episode of Digital Disruptor with me your host, Paul Mueller. Today we are rejoined by serial innovator and recipient of the 2011 Champion of Change Award by the US White House, but more prestigious, a prior guest on Digital: Disrupted. I mean talk about 15 minutes of fame. He blew it right up there. Chief Innovation Officer at Everblue Jon Boggiano. Hey Jon.

JB: Hey, thanks for having me back, Paul.

PM: Welcome back. It's so good to have you. And I was just re-listening to the show. It was just so many nuggets in there and we did talk about getting back together to delve a little more deeply into some of those topics. Looking forward to doing it. Ordinarily we jump straight to the lightning round, but we've had a lightning round. If people don't know how you responded to those questions, we're going to encourage them to go back in time and listen to the first episode. But I have got a question for you. We've spent a, what did somebody say to me? We need a robot to read all of the posts about the robots, about robots writing posts or creating content. ChatGPT, it's a huge topic at the moment. Generative AI, the computers are coming for our jobs. Just wondering, as an innovator, innovation doesn't equal technology, but in this particular instance we've got robots supposedly innovating, creating new content. What are your thoughts on ChatGPT? Should we be worried?

JB: I'll tell you that I'm both excited and worried probably because I have friends that are working and at a group called the Existential Risk Initiative and they're specifically looking at how do you teach ChatGPT and other AI's morality and how do we have them not unintentionally kill us? And I'd recommend, Tim Urban from Wait but Why has a great blog on the progression of AI and once you get go from ChatGPT as a general AI to a super AI, it will be as different to us as we are to a spider. We don't understand how a spider thinks and the AI won't understand us, and we will be non-consequential in its world. And that scares me. But at the same time, and I think this is the first time that we've ever created technology that can actually innovate on its own. Once you put all these pieces together where this is going, I think that is going to, everything else in the past has always required human intervention and what happens when ChatGPT doesn't need a human anymore to continue learning and improving, what happens when it can program itself? That's going to be a really interesting change. Your thoughts on that?

PM: Well, yeah, I've, I've got to admit, and maybe it's because I don't completely understand ChatGPT is, I've always been running on the assumption that because it is fundamentally a, it's an SI, however you like to pronounce the word in my mind, that is, you know, you throw a lot of existing prior art through it and it starts to create this large language model which is associative and so forth. And let's put it this way, if you ask it the same prompt, I presume you get the same answer each time, right?

JB: No, actually, which is interesting. Because it is constantly learning. So, it learns every time you ask it a question and I ask it a question. And so the hundred million users that are interacting with it are teaching new things. So even in the span of a few seconds or a few minutes, the answer will likely differ because it is learning, it is on a global scale, at a pace that we can't even comprehend. And ChatGP  is still a very limited AI, but the underlying technology we are in the early stages, it's like the HP Newton of 1998 give it 10, 15 years and it will mature quite a bit. But it's learning constantly and I think that's something we have a hard time understanding.

PM: Fair point. So maybe let me rephrase that. Were it not given any new information, it would generate the same result. So, let's imagine for a second that you paused the world, you asked it a question or gave it a prompt and then replayed that you would get, I'm presuming something approaching a hundred percent fidelity of answer.

JB: I would assume that, but that's a really good question actually. What I'm going to test that.

PM: The reason I bring that up is because I can't think of a human, if you ask them the same question two times in a row that you'd be likely to get a high fidelity, unless it was a simplistic question, what is one plus one that you would get a consistent result. And even if it was a human and a simple question, like one plus one, I might suddenly feel playful for example, and go, yeah, the answer's window or something stupid, right? Because my little brain just does what it does. The reason I'm going through this diatribe is because is it a reflector or is it the director? Right? Is it actually synthesizing new thoughts? Could it have that, as I said, that absurd moment where it chooses to be absurd? Something that again is when we think about innovation sometimes it's like, what happens if I combine this with this? Would that make something interesting? I don't know. That's my, I suppose I kind of look at it and think it's only as good as us, it's just a reflector us, it's ability to, I guess the point of singularity where it is bigger and brighter than us is inherently limited by its capability for novelty. Thoughts?

JB: Yeah, I'd agree with that. I think that the way, so from everything I've understood, the risk isn't that it's going to become super smart, basically a superhuman, the risk is that it goes off on some errant exercise. If you're a stapler making company and you give it the directive of making staplers as efficiently as possible and it decides that, and then AI decides that humans are the inefficiency in the process and decides to kill the humans in the process to make staplers more efficient, you'll wind up with the world full of staplers and then AI that just keeps making staplers. And so it's not, the risk with AI is that it goes errant and not that it becomes a self-aware, superhuman. Does that make sense?

PM: Yes, super sentient. Yeah, we talked about the paperclip problem. I've heard of the paperclip versus the stapler thing, but it's the same concept. The idea that a simple instruction or a simple mission make paperclips or make staplers without an appropriate set of parameters around it. The machine would build all of the infrastructure, cities, whatever was required to most efficiently produce that outcome. Yeah, I do agree that the idea of it going rogue or any technology going rogue once it has, and I suppose, so what it does have that I think is interesting is obviously this notion of generative adversarial networks. The idea that it has this inner tension where it tests an idea through that adversarial process. It's much like we would with innovation. That's a very human construct. The idea of absurdity is the thing that I think it's kind of missing at the moment, right? It's almost, it's like data from Star Trek, it's cult logic. 

JB: Yes.

PM: Versus for now. Well for now and exactly mate, can you a sense of play. I mean at the end of the day, we are just, well putting religion to one side, we're just a bag of chemicals. Molecules.

JB: Absolutely. 

PM: Yeah. That happens to react in a certain way. So, I suppose why can't the computers do it? It's fascinating. Hey, there you go. The ChatGPT show everyone.

JB: Well actually just to tie this into what we're going to talk about today, which is innovation, which is you were curious about something, you asked a question and while we were standing here talking, I happened to have ChatGPT open because I use it most days now. And I just conducted an experiment, so I asked it the same question twice and I got different answers. The same ultimate answer, but it was written differently and formatted differently.

PM: Fascinating.

JB: There you go. And so I asked it what is Everblue? And it gave me, I'm sorry, some explanation or provide more context and I asked the same question again and then it gave me a different set of wording about that. And so yeah, really interesting, I hadn't thought to do that before.

PM: And this is the point I'm trying to get at, right? Would it think to do something so stupid basically. Or would it be arrogant and assume it already knew the answer?

JB: Or will it ever get its own agency? Will it ever do something without a human directing it will ever decide of its own. I think there's all this stuff about how do you know when it's self-aware, because it's already pasted the touring test. There's a whole bunch of jail breaks now that do anything now and you can get it to do quirky and hacky type things, but it's always been a human prompting it. So I find it fascinating. So, if I I'd an change my lightning round answers, I'd say that generative AI is probably going to become the most disruptive technology because it is so different from any technology before it.

PM: I think you're got a point there, and again, I've mentioned this on the show once before. Welcome to the ChatGPT episode. Yet I sit there, and I talk to my various AIs and type in stuff in and I find that also I get so much crap back from these things that we are astounded by. It would be a little bit like a child who suddenly muttered the words of Shakespeare but then continues to draw on the walls with crayons for the next three days. And you sit there going, yep, the child's a genius. And you're like, no, it's eating sand. No, it just happened to get lucky. I do wonder.

JB: Or in 15 years and it might be a genius.

PM: Or it might continue to eat sand. And I think we do ascribe a lot of hyperbole to its moments of brilliance. And again, I'm sort of theorizing it here, but we get very excited about that. But from what little I've seen, and it's funny because I, I've almost resisted falling into the thing. I played with it very briefly and then went, I've got other things I need to get on with. I do wonder whether, again, as I say, I have so many interactions with a lot of these assistances of various thoughts and they do a pretty crappy job a lot of the time. Don't get me wrong, I can get Siri to book my appointment for me, but then it does so many things badly that you wonder whether or not, sorry, am I making sense?

JB: No, it makes sense. Lemme just give you one quick example of how, and it relates to the innovation because it's here as a tool. My son is in high school, the American high school, US high school, and he is in a computer science course and he's got a final project that he's got to, he's got to work on to write a computer program in Python. So, and the college board, it's an AP course, they published a PDF of 25 pages worth of instructions for all the rules. And so  ChatGPT 4.0 can now read PDF documents and that type of stuff. So, I gave it the document and I said, write a Python program that complies with all these rules and it did. My son, we tested it and it works and then comply. And so it was able to consume a complex document with lots of instructions and produce a working set of code that complied with the rules. I find that pretty incredible. And even if it ever takes over the world. The ability for a layperson who doesn't maybe doesn't even understand how to write code, to do something like that is pretty incredible.

PM: And it's definitely, I think the cheer squad are all saying the same thing, which is there's an augmentation of our capability. Tremendous. I think the other question, talking about the end of society, another way of looking at it, which I'm sure you've heard is that it's the old argument against putting calculators, digital calculators into schools is it's going to dumb everybody down because as you say, why do the homework assignment when you can get the computer to do it for you? I'm old enough to remember when, you know, had to write out lines as a punishment.

JB: Yeah, I remember doing that, yes.

PM: Yeah. And I dunno if you were the kid that came back with the fan fold paper, so 100 print the words, blah blah, blah, line two go to 100 and it just printed out, well actually you had a counter in there of course and you just printed out the lines and you came back the next day and dropped it on your teacher's desk and went, there it is. I must not speak in class. Right a hundred times. Are you happy? Right. Do the computers start doing the homework for the kids? My nephew was having a conversation with my mother saying, look, school's broken now because why should I write the essay myself when I can get ChatGPT o do it for me and insert the odd thing around it, but basically I don't need to write the essay. It's an interesting thought.

JB: Yeah, it is an interesting thought. In my son's case, he wanted to learn the code so he, he's written code and he compared it to what GPT came up with and he's decided to write a program from the song that Jimmy Buffett sung five o'clock somewhere, to tell you a different city every time you ask it where in the world is five o'clock and that's his little project. So he wanted to learn it and then we were talking about and he is like, I maybe only need to understand how code works, I don't even need to write it because of this tool, I need to solve the problem and code is just a tool to do that. And so we actually had that exact conversation. So it's interesting as a 15 year old to see his perspective of it.

PM: Yeah, I love it. And well look let's talk about the bit topic of innovation because right now what we do know is unlike the Luddite that I am, there are people all around the world at the moment from the coalface right up to the boardroom having conversations going. A year ago we were talking about blockchain, three years before that we were talking about big data and how we rub it on our strategy. Before that it was the web, as I said now it was NFTs and blockchain a year ago board. With that, let's move on to the next, it's now about AI and ChatGPT, let's rub this on the business. I'm sure you see this in your innovation discussions with your clients. What's going back to this notion that technology is a synonym for innovation is let's rub AI on what we're doing and that'll fix our broken business. So, let's talk a bit about this, but before we do maybe a very quick recap for people who missed the first episode. Just tell us a little bit about your story and how it is that you came to be so focused on and centric to a lot of organizations innovation transformation processes.

JB: From when I was a kid growing up, I've always been curious about how do we make things better. Whether that's in civic life, going around navigating Jersey City, New Jersey, or whether that's in school or when I got in the army or when I worked for United Technologies. And then as a serial entrepreneur, I've been fascinated with solving problems and to me innovation is the process and the art of solving problems more creatively than maybe they're being done now. And so, innovation is doing something new, better or different. That's the way that I would define it. I usually lead an exercise of having people define it for themselves and it’s got to be something better than was there before. And now I'm fascinated with, and I think this is this conversation today, last time we talked about innovation as an individual. Innovation is a process and it's a mindset that anyone can learn to do.

It's not like it's not a skill that you're just gifted with, it's a teachable skill. And we've taught teenagers all the way up to 70-year-olds, because they’re still working in companies. And so anybody can learn to follow the process. So is so it is an individual, anybody can innovate. The question that really fascinates me now and has for the past few years is how do you build a culture of innovation? How do companies and for the audience of your show, how do you know the IT and technical departments of medium to large companies facilitate innovation both within their organization and for the company as a whole? And I think that is a fascinating question and that is a large part of the work that we've been doing is how do you unlock innovation in cultures that otherwise don't consider themselves innovative?

PM: Which would be a great topic to talk about on the next show because we've consumed all our time talking. I'm just kidding. So let's jump into this. So, first question I have to ask you though is why is innovation as a term used so frequently by businesses and people? So I was going to use the word poorly, but maybe inconsistently is a better phrase. So, before we talk about how to do it right, let's talk a bit about some of the anti-patents you’ve seen.

JB: I have a love-hate relationship with the word innovation. It's used flippantly in a lot of places. I mean I hear it everywhere. We want to be innovative. We are innovative. I mean it is amazing how I hear it everywhere because I'm attuned to it. But I think in most places it's not defined. It's usually described as an adjective that really doesn't have any meaning. It's, it's a virtue signaling thing. It's not, no practicality behind it. And if I could come up with a better word for it, that was universally understood I would, and we've talked about that. But yeah, it's the challenges that you're fighting a lot of noise that has just burnt people out. So, they hear it, you tune it out and you don't even think about it.

PM: Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more.

JB: And so one of the things, the first step in the cultural innovation process or the company or the leadership to define what they mean, you routinely can read CEO statements or board statements about a company that wants to be innovative without defining what that means. If you're a Ford motor company, does that mean you're going to improve the fabric of the seatbelt or does it mean you're going to design the flying car? Those are two very different examples of innovation, and they just say, we're going to be an innovative company. Okay, well what does that mean?

PM: Yeah. So, let's talk then about how to build a culture. You talk a bit about the innovation mindset. What is that and how do I get to the point where we've got that innovation mindset and is that really the cornerstone of culture or is there another thing that is more important for building an innovation culture?

JB: So, I think as an individual it comes back to curiosity and curiosity drives learning and experimentation. And a good analogy as an individual would be if I gave you a math test and what's one plus one, there's a right answer, it's two. But if I said, gave you a bunch of Legos and we do this in a lot of our sessions, we'll put Legos on the table and we'll like take this glass marble and have it drop from the table to the floor without breaking. And you build a Lego structure. If you had five teams in a room, there'd be five different ways of doing that that would all accomplish the objectives. So that's an example of experimentation of play. The structures fall over and then you could say, okay, now that you've built it, reduce the number of Legos to make it more efficient to be able to do that.

And so that's an example where five teams can accomplish the task very differently without it being the right answer. And so that innovation mindset is more like playing with Legos and less like doing a math test in school and everybody's got a piece of that in them themselves. I have to shift gears when I get home from work. At work a lot of times to-do list driven. I've got all these tasks, emails respond to, I'm very to-do lists, so I'm productivity, productivity driven, and then I get home and I want to play with my kids. And they're not productivity driven. They want to goof off and wrestle on the couch. They want to go jump on the trampoline. There's no measure of that productivity. And so, it literally is more like a play mindset. And so, playing at work is something that we encourage, we encourage playfulness at work as a form of creativity, as a form of driving the innovation.

So that's for the individual. For the organization, it's a slightly different challenge. It is encouraging that curiosity. So, it's empowering employees to learn you. Every organization has creative employees within it already. And a part of the innovation process is finding them and empowering them to go learn things and solve problems. Technology could be an enabler of that, but a lot of times you don't need a technology solution. There are process solutions, there's other solutions, other tools in the toolkit that are enablers there. But really it comes down to enabling your curiosity seekers to learn new things and conduct experiments. In the business world, we have a bad habit of every project must succeed. We don't tolerate failure. And that's the antithesis of innovation. If it can't fail, it's probably not going to be innovative. And I can go into this little more detail, but you asked about the innovation mindset. That's it right there.

PM: And I wanted to touch on that a little bit because specifically, and we touched on this a little in the last show is, and you just gave a great example, ask five teams to design something with Lego for example, or whatever tool they're given and you're likely to get six different outcomes. Do you know what I mean? That is one of the definitions of waste is that you are probably going to pick one of those and move it forward as your big idea, which means 80% of your work's going to be thrown away. Probably an extreme example, but you get the point I'm trying to make is how do you get leaders heads around the idea that innovation is risky, is wasteful, but also how do you get the cheerleaders like me going, innovation's wasteful. How do you keep them under control and stop them from that mentality, from metastasizing and basically everyone just sits there, not so much goofing off, but you've turned it into a science lab that doesn't actually produce anything practical.

JB: So, I can lay out a chart for you. On the left side, it's very simple, you've got people, problems and process. So, innovation is all about people. It's inspiring and motivating people to want to solve problems. And the organizational leader's responsibility is to define a process for that to happen. And the way that you constrain the waste is you stage gate it or sandbox it. And so the left side of the chart is people, problems, process. Notice I didn't say technology in there, technology's  an enabler. IT itself is not innovative. And then across the top you've got the innovation process. It's very similar to design thinking, if people are familiar with that. And you start really, really small, you conduct very small experiments that are low cost, very quick, low effort, and you conduct lots of them. And then as those move forward, you then conduct bigger ones and bigger ones to the point where the company starts to have to make the decision to commit serious resources.

But you constrain it by basically stage gating the process. So it's very, very small. So you can go to an executive and say, look, we've got a 300 million IT budget, we're going to spend 200,000 on innovation and we're going to try and conduct 20 to 30 experiments. And so you make it very small and you de-risk it. And then as those experiments learn something, you come back and say, okay, we've learned it, now we want to spend half a million or a million to validate these core concepts. And you work your way up the value process there. When the risks get bigger, so the risk get reduced, but the opportunity gets bigger. And so that experimentation process, that's a part of the process, the enabling process of the company. I can go into that a lot more of what that looks like. But at the end of the day that is with the leadership of the company. When they talk about innovation, it really is people focused on a problem following a process. And a lot of times that process needs to happen outside of the existing organizational structures.

PM: What does that mean?

JB: So very commonly you have responsibilities for any one project split across. Particularly for IT, you have purchasing, you have a business unit, sometimes you have multiple business units, you've got a PMO office, you've got the IT department, you've got all of these stakeholders responsible for any one project, big or small. And any one of them will slow things down. Purchasing can slow things down tremendously. And every time you slow it down, the curious person who's trying to conduct experiment, you slow down their learnings, they lose momentum. So especially in the early stages of innovation, if you can pull them out of that process where they're given authorization to disregard the purchasing rules, to make decisions quickly, you give them, it could be as small as hey innovation team, we're going to give you a thousand dollars. You can spend that however you want. You can go buy that SaaS software that it says you can't use because you want whatever.

They let them make those decisions at a very small micro scale and then go faster and put that process outside. Now at some point it needs to, when you start to, you go beyond prototyping, you want to scale, it needs to come back into the capital planning and all that type of stuff. But for the most part you need to have a process that enables them to experiment quickly to learn and experiment very, very quickly and outside of the process. So that could be, there's lots of individual tools that you can use to do that, but really the leadership or the leadership needs to set a process for innovation that is outside of the existing norms. Because if you have to wait six months for approval to conduct an experiment, the person that's motivated to do that is probably going to lose interest in that six months.

PM: So, as part of my role leading organizations, I've tried to take that construct and I've misapplied it. This is me being a little vulnerable here and I've more than once created an environment where I've said to the team, we've got this set of construction rules and requirements and constraints we have to live within, whatever those might be. But I encourage you if there's a run, an experiment, take a risk. If we learn, so long as we learn something from it, we document it, we capture it, great, and we'll get smarter and we won't do it again. Or maybe we'll incorporate it init the way we do things. What sometimes happens is you get these competing teams start to bubble up who through no fault of their own see the same problem. They start to apply their creativity to it, and they become, as we often do, hatched to our little thought babies, our idea babies, our innovation babies, even at the early stages. And then you almost get this adversarial situation going on inside the organization and people can't agree on the right way, of the five different ways to put the Legos together somebody gets very attached to their way of doing it and suddenly becomes an incredibly emotional environment. Does that resonate with you?

JB: It does. And I'd say two things to that. First, you want to evoke those emotions because the person who's emotionally invested is going to give you significantly more of their mind share solving that problem. And so you want to capture that. You want to capture that emotional engagement. And that's what I'm talking about behind that momentum. When somebody's motivated to learn or do something, you want to unleash that. A motivated employee will go, or a motivated teammate will go significantly deeper into a problem than somebody who's just assigned a task as an extra duty. And so first of all, you want to capture that. Second, that's a part of the process is keeping it reframed. So, we talk about thinking like a scientist. A scientist has to step back from the outcome of their experiment. And so they're happy whether the outcome is positive or negative.

And that is talking about that explicitly in advance helps people become detached from their solution the best. And their solution is the only way. Does it work out perfectly? No, because people will become attached to things. But for the most part you want to, and okay, this is a part of the stage gating when we do this within companies is you need to have closure as well. And so a lot of times when you say, oh, go experiment, teams go and experiment, but there's not a defined end period. And so you can say, you know what? You can conduct an experiment for 30 days. We're going to run experiments for 30 days. So you've got 30 days to prove a concept. At the end of 30 days, we're going to celebrate the lessons learned, the successes, the failures, and we're going to end it.

It's done. Now if you want to conduct another set of experiments, that's another round, you may have to reform your team, you may have to bring a new idea to the table. But a lot of times what we don't do is we don't have that closure. We just leave people hanging at the end. And so there was this experimentation period where you're encouraging them to go experiment, but we don't actually have a celebration or closure that says even if you got a negative outcome, even if your idea wasn't chosen, we're celebrating you just for bringing that idea to the table. And we want you to go find other ideas and other problems to solve.

PM: So, counter intuitively, the innovation process just is creative and wasteful. And by creative I guess we mean that's that awful word, right? Because creativity, I think is the notion of creating, it doesn't mean you are, you're not the idea fairy you called it last time, right? The idea is creative doesn't mean you wear interesting clothes to work every day. It means you are a creator. You created something from that wasn't there previously. But we think about all of the somewhat anarchic, free flowing, associative processes of innovation. But it sounds to me like there's a lot of rigor and process that needs to go around it, which is almost the antithesis or maybe even the antidote to what could otherwise just be a free for all.

JB: So there are structures that when put in place can help companies, because remember, it's all about empowering employees and that's for both recruiting, you want to bring innovative people to your company and you want to inspire the curiosity driven folks that you already have. So you might want to collect them. So one structure would be running an innovation champions program. Hey Paul, I'm your boss and I've identified that hey, you ask a lot of really good questions. You want to solve a lot of problems, why don't you go spend some time as a part of the Innovation champions program and we're going to celebrate that. And you get to feel good about being a part of that. And by the way, people in that program can bring ideas to an executive council. So now you get face time with the leadership. I mean we'll call that an innovation council and they run a process quarterly where they take new ideas in and they seed fund ideas and you get some hours of your day to go work on your idea.

And we celebrate that. Cause at the end of the quarter we're going to, your ideas probably going to get shut down, but if not, then maybe you just talked yourself into a new job. And so putting in those structures sets expectations and allows people, a lot of positive framing in that, where instead of it being, there's a lot of times you'll see the bosses be jealous or upset or frustrated that their employee is spending time on something and not getting their quote work done. I'm not going to lose you from my team. And so, framing it positively, whereas talent development or it's an innovation champions. And that is a, that's a framework that changes the mindset around it. Does that make sense?

PM: It does. And I guess where I'm going with my thought here is you've got some very, very clear ideas on how this should work compelling and informed by a ton of experience. If I'm trying to build software or actually just run a project, I've got the PMI who've got their methodologies and I've got the agile manifesto and a prescriptive set of processes. Is there that, when we talk about process here, is there a prescriptive set of processes or methodologies that I can pick up off the shelf and apply to every organization or at least say, 80% accuracy infidelity? Or is it going to have to be handcrafted each time if I'm trying to build that culture?

JB: So, the specific innovation process is it works across organizations. Doesn't matter whether you're Mattel toys or whether you're an energy company or whether you're a government organization, it works or whether you're a startup. Literally the startup ecosystem. We do a lot of work with startup ecosystems and people think, oh, the big company is different than a startup ecosystem. The individual, the team working on an innovative idea should follow the exact same process. It's whether or not you try to define it the same way, it's the same process. So I think that the reason I like the structures and I like helping organizations use the tools in the structure, in the toolbox, because once it's there, when you have a change in middle management, senior leadership, you have personnel turnover, you have a new CIO, you have a new CEO, you have, it's more definable for them to grab onto.

Cause usually this is driven by somebody comes into an organization and wants to make it innovative. So you have an individual that's driving this process within a company, they have a set life cycle, they're probably not going to be there more than two to four years because that type of person typically gets bored and wants to solve new problems. And so, they're going to move on. That's just what we've seen. And so their challenge is to get enough of this process and enough of these tools in place so that it has longevity within the organization.

PM: So, follow on question, where's the book? Where's this methodology? Where do I get access to it? How do I start that process by, sometimes it is a bit, think about design thinking. I've got Tim Brown's book on my shelf behind me, right? Part of the wave of revolution of design thinking was put it to print and people can start to absorb it and it becomes a bit of a cultural artifact that gets distributed around the office. What's the equivalent in innovation from your perspective?

JB: That is a great question. A lot of our material is derived from Stanford D School, but that is again, to the specific individual innovation process of a team or a product or a solution or rather than to the organizational side. In fact, you and I talked last time about maybe writing a book about this because I haven't seen, there's Good to Great, there's some classic business books about how to run a great enterprise. There's the Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christiansen, which talks about a lot of this, but there's not that I have seen, that I can give somebody an organizational playbook that you can come in on how to create a more innovative culture. I wish there was one, we'd be happy to work with any of your audience, but really this is, I think needed is what's a playbook that somebody can follow that tactically tells that how to do this. I don't know if that exists right now. If you have any ideas of, I'd be happy to hear.

PM: Question for ChatGP? No, I think you got that in you. I really do. I find it really compelling to listen to. I have somewhat steered the conversation in my direction just because I'm naturally curious about this whole process. Is there anything I'm missing or anything that if we were to end this today when we were talking about the culture of building a culture of innovation, that you'd feel like, gosh dang, we hung up and we didn't talk about this.

JB: Two things that I'd say, innovation typically has to relate to the bigger why. Why does the company exist? What is the problem it's solving in the world and how do we do that better? In the case of Mattel toys, it's bringing joy to a child's life. And then you want to inspire your employees to that bigger why. In the case of a utility, a lot of them are driven by either security because they're worried about, as the grid changes threats to the security of the grid, they're motivated by climate change or how we generate power has to change and it has to change quickly to overcome climate change. And so if you want to solve a problem, framing it that way, so it inspires employees. So to me, creating an innovative culture arks back to what's the purpose and the mission of an organization, why does it exist?

And connecting that why to the employees, which by the way also leads to recruitment. If you want to recruit more innovative employees, more inspired employees, innovation ties directly into the purpose that the reason that organization exists. Everybody, not everybody, like it's great if you want a job for paying benefits and stability, but a lot of people also want to be motivated. They want to know that what they work on matters, and it matters so much that we need find a way to do it better. So that was, that's number one. And then number two, what I tell individuals is that this isn' , most of the innovations, most of the organizations we work with, this doesn't start at the CIO or the CEO level. So if somebody's listening to this and they want to make their culture more innovative, it can start at just about any level. It can start small, and it can grow bottom up, and it can ultimately get the attention to the executives who can latch onto that. And so, you don't have to wait until you as an individual are an executive, in a position of power to be able to implement a lot of these organizational strategies. And so that would be my, that's my inspirational pitch to anybody listening to this because that's often a question we get asked is, well, I don't have a lot of power around the organization, so what can I do?

PM: Yeah. And I have seen that happen. One of the other things that we talked a little bit about last time, and again for those of you who've made it this far through the ChatGPT sidebar, welcome to the show. But you talked about the idea that, you know, find government and government bureaucracy full of potential or words to that effect. And bureaucracies in general, I would argue, and again, when we think about, sorry, bear with me, for our listeners. When we think about innovation, you think about the iPod, the iPhone, bringing something new to market that hasn't been there before. But when you think about the word problem, which is something you ground your definition of innovation in, right, is it's looking for problems that would have value if they were solved, right? Value could be novelty, value could be differentiation, it could be cost savings, efficiencies. There's a lot of boring stuff that can be fixed through innovation. And that's not necessarily the domain of a product creator. It could be an administrative assistant who's looking at something thinking this process is bad for employees, it's bad for customers, let's fix it. You're nodding here. Tell me a little bit about why you're nodding.

JB: I have to laugh because typically I'd say that frustration is one of the roots of drive that drives curiosity and innovation and innovative culture. Everybody is frustrated. You called it boring. I agree. A lot of stuff is boring every, a lot of stuff is boring. But at a day-to-day basis, if I'm filling out a form, if I'm waiting on purchasing, if I'm in IT and the business units giving me a hard time because something didn't go right, all of those are making my individual day worse and I'm now frustrated and I should be asking the question of how do I make this better? How do I avoid this in the future? How can I be closer to the business unit? How can I solve the purchasing? How can the project be better? Every one of those would spark curiosity in me. And it has, when I've worked in larger organizations of how do we make this better.

How do I go talk to the other person who I'm frustrated with to make that better? Every time I submit a form to a government agency, and I know they're manually processing it on the back end, I'm like shaking my head, I'm like, oh my God, you're like, you're going to take six weeks to give me a yes or no on something that's a simple decision. Come on, business has been automating that 20 years ago, let's get on with it. And so I would say that's an example where individuals have the power. That executive, the administrative assistant that can go talk to the person they're submitting the forum to and say, what are you really doing with this? I'm filling out 20 fields here. Are you using all of them or is just this is what you've done historically. Can I just give you the two that you're actually using? That's a form of innovation, right there. It’s not maybe world changing, but it's going to change her life and make her life easier. Does that make sense? And that's what it does, that really is defining it. You want both in an organization, you want the ground tactical, the cumulative iterative improvements of day-to-day paper cuts getting improved, but you also want the larger scale stuff. And a lot of employees can be empowered without anybody telling them to make their lives better. Anything that frustrates you is an opportunity for improvement.

PM: I love it. One last thing about the culture of innovations, creating a safe culture. You spoke last time, I'm a big believer in this, and in fact maybe I'd like to think I demonstrate it, I ask a lot of dumb questions, right? I unleash my inner six year old, as you described it all the time. I am in the room always saying and thinking just dumb stuff, pardon me for swearing on the show. But I said that as a strength and as a value, and it's taken me to get to my fifties to the point where I don't care what people think about whether my question is stupid or not. What does frustrate me when that happens is people think that when I ask a dumb question that I necessarily want, that they need to know the answer. What I trying to say here is I think one of the things that I find challenging about this notion of safety to ask questions is twofold. Number one is people putting down the dumb question and therefore burying that inside the organization. And I find it's particularly associated with underrepresented minorities in an organization. They tend to get squashed. And then the second is the mansplaining answer from someone who often doesn't necessarily even know the answer, but they sort of put it forth and say, oh, that's not really a problem. You don't understand the way this organization works and shut the innovation process down before it's even started that. Have you seen that? Can you talk to that?

JB: So that is about a third of when we do training and consulting. About a third of the work we do is mindset and empathy oriented. And there's two parts to that. The part one is individuals. As an individual, what are my self-judgments, my self-critical judgments that keep me from sharing authentically. So arming people with the knowledge that, hey, just because you're young, just because you're different, just because you're new, doesn't mean your contribution isn't valued. And a lot of times when we talk about is that actually being a benefit, so we take that, we flip that from being a weakness to being a benefit. When you get the beginner's knowledge, the beginner's mindset is so much more powerful than what we call the cursive knowledge. The person who's been doing a job for 30 years can't see how to do it differently, whereas the brand new person that comes in can ask the dumb question.

And then on the flip side, the other side of that is helping people become more aware of, and there are absolutely tools to do it for doing this, more aware of how they listen to others and who they go to. So, you get more authentic sharing, you get more authentic communication. Just because somebody's quiet, they're young, they're a woman, they're different. Whatever the background, that's not traditionally in a setting, you want to recognize that, and you want to actually confirm what they're asking. There's a whole series of techniques around that. And so, the empathy piece I think is really important because that gets back to the problem you're solving. Understanding the problem means you got to go out and talk to people. And when you talk to people, you need empathy to talk to them because you need to understand what they're actually saying, not what you think they're saying, that you're not projecting what you think, you're trying to understand how they think.

I mean, there's an art to asking those questions and that is very, very popular. People love that stuff. And it's not framed, at least here in the US, we try very much try to avoid politics, but it's not about left or right, liberal woke or whatever. It's about being a good person and understanding, having empathy for somebody else and recognizing that all of the contributions are valued. The 73-year-old, that was one of our great contributors to a project team was the secretary in a company. But like you said, she dealt with a lot of the administrative processes. She knew how stuff in that company worked. She would not be a traditional voice at a table for how to improve things.

PM: I go back to Douglas Adams, I'm going to paraphrase this incorrectly. Sorry, I'm going to paraphrase this cause I can't give it to you verbatim. But in the book, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, if you've not read it, highly recommend it. He talked about these two creatures and two characters in the book. One was this electric monk, and the other was the horse that it was sitting on. And he wrote, and it just stuck in my mind for the last 30 years. He said, the monk sat on the horse and didn't think about the horse. The horse, however, had a lot to say about the monk sitting on top of it. And I do think that the secretary in this instance was the horse. And all of your employees are typically the horses. They're sitting there going, this is asinine, this is crazy why we're doing it this way. They're a wonderful source of potential innovations, but because of their seniority, I think a lot of us just immediately discount them as being part of the process. Or they don't have the word innovation officer in their title.

JB: That's a big one. Well, I don't have the job title. Well, it's not a job title. It's anybody can do it. That gets back to everybody can innovate.

PM: Oh, I love it. I actually often say to my new employees when they join an organization is write down every dumb thing you see in the next 90 days, please. Before you become stupid like us.

JB: Yeah, well, we haven't done this, but I've seen cultures that are doing this more and more now is when you onboard an employee, typically you onboard them and you teach them all of your processes. I've seen a couple organizations now, the first thing they do is they ask that person to tell them what makes them unique and what they're bringing to the organization to make the organization better. So before you enculturate them with, this is how we do things here, tell us about yourself and what you bring so we can bring your differences into the company. I do think, and on diversity, I absolutely think diversity when done in an empathetic setting leads to more innovative outcomes. And so, I think that is, you want five different people at a table that have five different points of view to get a complete picture.

PM: Well, I think it's worth, and again, I might have reached the wrong conclusion out of today's podcast, but I do feel it would be worth it if you could find the time for us to come back and talk a bit about empathic listening and empathic questioning. Because it is, I think, to your point, framing the problem, being able to have that safe conversation because you're often, again, one of the things I think about innovation is this is where I think innovation programs sometimes are dashed up against the rocks of bureaucracy. No, of incumbency. Is because you are possibly threatening something that was put in place by the very manager you're sitting in the room with. And that's a very risky situation to find yourself in.  So I wonder whether there's something in just delving a little bit more into that, because this stuff is easier to say and in the right space it's easy to do, but there are a lot of places which are, it's not always safe to come to bring your full self to work. And how do you get to the point where you can build that, and maybe for some of our listeners as well, how do you identify that maybe the place you're in is not that environment and the only way you're going to get change is to leave and go somewhere else. 

JB: I think empathy is the, it's the unstated core of the problem solving. I think that it's because, again, people, this is all about people. It's how people interact with technology. It's how people are motivated to want to be curious to solve problems. Like that empathy piece, I've become personally fascinated by it the last 10 or 15 years. I've read as many books as I can. I had some great experiences at Stanford. I even think for startup founders, if they could go through empathy building exercises, it will make them better at product management, product development, and at acquiring employees when you have a small team. So I'm a big believer in the empathy thing, and I think that empathy is the core of innovation.

PM: I love it. What we're going to do is we're going to create the book. We're going to do this as a series of podcasts. You and I will just go through it once a week and we'll just create the book in audio form. And then we'll just get an AI to translate that into text. And there's your book. We can probably even get a generative AI to draw some diagrams for us while we're at it as well. There you go.

JB: Yeah, I like it, that would actually be interesting to see what AI comes up with. But, we've talked about enough about that today.

PM: We have. Jon, was there anything else we missed before? I know we've got to the top of the hour for you. Sorry, an hour already passed by. Anything before we wrap up today's episode that's burning for you?

JB: Nope. I would just go back to innovation is something that everyone can do, and I'm convinced that every culture can become innovative with the right tool set and the right motivation to do it. And so I think that is, I hear a lot of organizational excuses of why it can't be done. And I would challenge anybody listening to this to think about the work that they're doing and the culture they're in and how they can be a voice of change in that culture. And so that would be my challenge is that it's possible every person in every company can become innovative. I would challenge you to look at that as anybody listening to this. Think about how you can contribute to an innovative culture within whatever organization you're in right now.

PM: And go back and listen to the first episode. There's some interesting, well, the whole thing is a fascinating prime affirm of this conversation. Jon, where can people go to learn more?

JB: So you can go to goeverblue.com, one of our websites, and if you just search Everblue and Innovation, you'll find us.

PM: Fabulous. The show sponsor. You've had this question once before, so you know where we're going. The show sponsor, Rocket Software, big thanks to Rocket, have a set of values that matter to them. Empathy, humanity, trust and love. Big love to you right now, by the way, thank you for coming back. What matters to you right now?

JB: I'm going to go with empathy after everything we just talked about. I think it's empathy. And I love that that's their first value.

PM: They're amazing values. They're brilliant, and they live them every day. I know the folks there real well. It's an amazing company. Thanks for joining us, Jon. And thank you again to Rocket Software for bringing us another episode of DD. And thank you all for listening in. If you'd like what you've heard, do give us, feedback as a gift. Seriously. Even if it's critical, we love to hear it. So hit us up. You can hit me up at Twitter at xthestreams, our show sponsor at Rocket. So if you've got any thoughts, just let us know. With that, we'll see you all next week. Stay disruptive, everyone.