jump the groove for everyday innovation

Innovation is both simpler and more difficult than most realize.  It’s difficult, as it involves risk, change and the unknown.  It’s simple, as innovation is as natural to people as breathing. It’s what human beings have done since the beginning of time. But quite often we forget how to do it, so we rely on innovation processes.

Innovation doesn’t have to be a 2-step, 6-step or 10-step process.  It doesn’t require specialized techniques, experts, off-sites, focus groups, task forces, laboratories or even “skunk works”.  All these things are useful, but the process is not innovation – it’s just process.  A mad genius, an expert or a task force can innovate, but so can regular people in their everyday work.

Quite often, innovation is seen primarily as an expensive, risky and time consuming activity that only big government or big business has the resources or patience to undertake.  Entrepreneurs, with their addiction to risk are also known for innovating – but only by working out of a garage, mortgaging their house, running up their credit cards and more often than not – failing.  Only crazy people and well funded companies innovate.

Special innovation processes are popular.  Even though they can be expensive and time consuming, they help people feel a little less risky and a little more reasonable.  The process helps everyone feel more “normal”.

Of course, process, techniques, teams, tools and special work spaces do help.  A skunk works is a very comfortable environment for innovators to work.  Getting away from the office with a good facilitator can help stimulate new thinking.  Working through a formula or process can give people comfort when facing the unknown. It can also help determine what is likely to work and what won’t before too much money and time is invested.

But it is important to understand that most of these innovation activities are not what makes innovation happen.  Innovation is not an activity, a process, a building, or a department…

…it is a way of thinking, a way of seeing, a way of living.

When people are not innovating every day, they tend to behave like a scratched vinyl record.  Before explaining this metaphor, it may be helpful to explain vinyl records to anyone who is not familiar with this older technology.

Before compact discs and MP3 recordings became commonplace, most music was distributed by vinyl records played on a rotating turntable.  Sound was encoded on the record on a long groove that started on the outside of the record and spiraled into the center.  The groove itself had bumps and valleys inside it that could be read by a small pointed needle or stylus that tracked through the groove and transmitted the sound ultimately to the speakers. The needle was attached to a flexible tone arm that allowed the needle to be dragged through the grooves at an even speed.

When the vinyl records scratched or accumulated dust in the grooves, there was a tendency for the needle to get “stuck”.  The music would play normally up to a certain point in the song, then, unable to continue, the needle would be pushed back to a previous point in the song.  The song would continue until it hit the obstruction again and started over once more.

If nothing was done to fix the problem, records would continue to play the same few moments of a song over and over again.

There were a couple of ways to solve the problem.  Listeners could hope that eventually the needle would push the obstruction out of the way and the song would continue playing on its own.  Occasionally that would work, but it would often take a long time to get there.  More effective were a variety of strategies to jump the groove; to get past the obstruction by hopping over it to the next section of the song.  Those strategies included lifting the needle off the record and moving it past the obstruction, hitting the side of the record player so the needle would “jump” to the next groove or even stomping on the floor so the vibration would jump the needle for you.

In order to innovate a process or product, it’s important to find a way to jump the groove as well.  Just as the record player gets stuck doing the same thing over and over with the same disappointing result, companies and organizations often get stuck as well.  Perhaps a product no longer sells as well as it used to no matter how hard the sales force works.  Perhaps a financial system is no longer providing safe leverage to businesses. Perhaps energy sources aren’t as reliable or as safe as they once were. In every case, the immediate instinct is to try doing the same thing until eventually the needle becomes unstuck by itself.  Alternatives are usually seen as too difficult, too risky or perhaps even impossible.

The job of an innovation process is to jump the groove.  Just like the record player, once an organization is able to see the problem from a different context, once they are able to jar their sensibility in such a way that they can see alternatives, then innovation is not only possible, it becomes a more rational, safe, even accepted activity.  The best processes focus on pushing people out of their current thinking and into a place where they can start over again with a “beginner’s mind”.

As it was eloquently put by Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi,  ”In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

But jumping the groove doesn’t have to wait for a special brainstorming session, a project, or for the skunk works.  It can be as simple as looking at an old problem for the first time.  Instead of assuming that the needle must progress on a straight path through the groove, maybe there is a way to jump out of the problem.  Just as Toyota’s Kaizen or Continuous Improvement empowers individual employees on the assembly line to find ways to eliminate waste, improve a process, or even stop the assembly line if something isn’t working, if everyone is encouraged to look at their work for the first time, every time – innovation becomes as natural as breathing.

At least, that’s how habitual innovators do it.  I doubt that Thomas Edison, Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson, and many other innovators ever had trouble jumping the groove in their minds.  To them, every problem, every process, every business was a new one.  When they looked at something, they looked for the first time, no matter how much experience, knowledge or success they had in the past.  That’s how they are able to re-imagine and rebuild answers to questions of products, technology, physics, government.  They jump the groove, not by doing what was done before, but by looking at the problem for the first time.

Surprisingly, solutions that are found through everyday innovation are quite often far less expensive and far less time consuming than the alternatives.  There are very important innovations that take a significant amount of capital, planning, time and process, but so many opportunities abound for everyday innovation as well.  It may be time to encourage everyone to look at their problems for the first time once more.

Fear and Innovation

There’s quite a bit of fear in the economy today. But that can be seen either as an advantage or a disadvantage for innovation. In some ways, it’s both.

Fear pushes companies to try new ideas and new approaches. As one leader of a small business recently told me, “We would be out of business three years ago if we hadn’t innovated.” Most innovators I talk with list fear as a source of strength.If you are losing customers, if money is scarce, and there is no other choice; you have to innovate.

At the same time, more than lack of capital, lack of good ideas, or lack of economic imperative; fear of change can be the most stubborn impediment to innovation.

According to David Johnson, CIO of Jones Lang LaSalle, “Middle managers think Innovation is such a big word. Innovation is too scary.” Employees have their fill of change right now, and innovation is just one more demand for change.

And fear can cripple innovation.Different people react differently to an environment that challenges their existence, and many will deny a new reality, resist change, and sometimes become paralyzed. As Tony Reynes, partner in a recruiting firm that is re-writing their entire business model, put it, “Some people just freeze up but I think a successful innovator says, “Okay, I’ve got to do something different.” Everyone is facing the same fear and everyone has the same opportunities. The innovators act on the new environment.”

Tracy Williams, a leader in agricultural ventures and former military officer, pointed out that the responsibility of a leader is to create a feeling of safety, to help those who are paralyzed take action. As he put it, “Look, part of my job is keeping my people safe from the people on top. Go make a mistake. As long as you haven’t done anything illegal, as long as it makes business sense, as long as you tell me when things go wrong, I can get you out of anything you get into. So let’s go do something.”

Another, more Machiavellian approach may be to avoid telling everyone that they are innovating.With some projects, it is possible to position the work in such a way that it does not seem to overtly threaten the status quo. Eventually, innovation always changes things – but to avoid unduly frightening the people whose work lives will change some innovators will use a Trojan Horse approach.

The Trojan Horse approach presents something new as if it were merely a slightly modified version of something old. The iPod, for example, was really just a digital version of a Walkman. A personal computer could be seen as just a typewriter with a screen. A car as a horseless carriage. Televisions, at first, were perceived as radios with pictures. Look at most successful innovations, and likely you will also find an analogue to an older technology or process that was used to get people comfortable with the idea.

At times, the Trojan Horse approach goes well beyond offering comfort. It can also cloak the true implications of an innovation – forcing us to change our lives without realizing it. Few people buying a computer in 1990 were buying into the complete transformation of our work and personal lives that took place in the next 15 years. If companies knew that the Internet would force them to share more information than they had ever shared before, would they have started creating Internet sites?

According to David Johnson, “anytime you are saying that you are innovating, you will get an initial buzz. But, as soon as everyone sees it as changing what they do, they become very opposed to it. So, when there is the slightest problem with developing a new innovation, everyone jumps to, “Aha, I told you this was never going to work! And the project gets killed.” Instead, try “…unveiling bits and pieces of it at a time. Emphasize how a certain function is made simpler, but avoid talking about any larger plans or potential for industry change.”

Jonathan Rutman of CB Richard Ellis uses a three ring binder to make fear of innovation less of an issue, “Every step of the process will go into this binder, every study, every point of data, and every decision we make will be captured on paper and put into your binder.Fear can be managed if you package it.”

But if you don’t use a Trojan Horse, it is important to acknowledge fear upfront, to be honest about what the real dangers, the real risks of any new project might be. Instead of pretending that there is no danger, there is a real need for innovators and leaders to be able to say, “This is difficult. It could fail. Let’s see what we can do to make it succeed.”

Brian Marshall, a consultant on innovative sales strategies, offered a different way to think about fear that could help explain why some are able to innovate now and others cannot. “Fear is nothing more than pain that hasn’t happened yet…the most compelling emotional motivator is pain – more so than fear.” The immediate pain of changing something right now will always trump the fear of something that might happen.

An example Brian used was the US auto industry, “The unions are now suddenly the most innovative group of people you will ever meet – but it may be too late. They are now able to make substantial change because they are in tremendous pain. The fear they felt two years ago was not enough to overcome the immediate pain of change.”

“What is innovation? It is a direct threat to the status quo. So those who are a part of that status quo will kill innovation if they see it threatening how they do things now.When they start to feel real pain, then they become the champions of change and innovation.”

Brian continued, “Great leaders and drivers of change are those that can take the fear of the future and bring it into the pain of the present before it’s too late.”

Fear is a powerful motivator for innovation, but it must be controlled, acknowledged, and worked with to overcome the natural resistance to change.

(This blog post is an excerpt from a Branson Powers, Inc. B2B Executive Innovation Roundtable that was held on June 19th, 2009. If you are interested in reading the full report, you can view the pdf file)

Uncomfortable Innovation

In order to change something, an innovator has to be comfortable with new ideas and at the same time be uncomfortable with the status quo. They have to be uncomfortable enough to want to change it – and willing to use untried approaches, unfamiliar skills, and even the wrong tools to make something better.

Tony Reynes, a principal of Tesar Reynes made this very clear to me recently when he said, “Instability and comfort with being off-balance certainly is a big part of why I’m an innovator.” Being comfortable with discomfort may be a crucial character trait for innovators.

Patrick Lamb of Valorum Law Group helped clarify the importance of discomfort by describing his new exercise regimen. His physicaltrainer requires Patrick to stand on an unstable platform whenever he performed an exercise. According to the trainer, the instability of the platform helps to build core muscles that are constantly compensating and trying to maintain some kind of internal balance. Translated to business and innovation, that same ideal holds, “if we are able to operate in an unstable way, we become stronger and better able to emphasize the positive sides of change.”

If people are unable to accept discomfort, they may not be able to innovate. Kevin Conlon of Conlon Public Strategies pointed out that traditional printers in the seventies and eighties, when negotiating new contracts with newspapers passed up the opportunity to take control of emerging electronic printing and remote printing technologies. Those printers, however, were very comfortable in their skills as traditional trainers. “They were given the opportunity to embrace new and unfamiliar technology – and instead opted for contracts that allowed them to be traditional printers forever with no burden to evolve professionally. There are now virtually no traditional printers at any of the major newspapers.”

It should come as no surprise then, that innovators often seem to straddle multiple worlds, multiple cultures, and quite often don’t completely fit in. They often don’t have the standard credentials or formulas for a problem – and therefore by default look at things in a fresh or unique way. And even when they know the formulas well, they are willing to put them aside.

People who are comfortable with how things are done right now, have little reason to change. The rational course of action for someone in that position is to avoid changing what they are doing, even if there’s a chance that things could become very uncomfortable in the future.

Jonathon Rutman of CB Richard Ellis has pointed out, “Those people who are the most successful in an old system are the last to see the reason to change – or to make any kind of change. Why give up what you have?”

Innovators are better able to find new solutions to old problems, not because they choose to – but because they have to. They are too uncomfortable to continue as they are.

Innovation needs to be uncomfortable.

(This blog post is an excerpt from a Branson Powers, Inc. B2B Executive Innovation Roundtable that was held on June 19th, 2009. If you are interested in reading the full report, you can view the pdf file)

Persuasion Rules

How can a company spend millions of dollars on award winning advertising, but still not sell more products?  Why do public speakers, when they follow all the rules given to them in public speaking courses, still bore their audiences?  How can a salesman, trained in the art of closing a sale, still be ineffective?

Perhaps they’re following the wrong rules.

Instead of spending more money and time getting better at the old rules of communication, I work with clients to learn and use more effective rules of persuasion.

The new rules of persuasion can overcome a wide range of communications issues.  By using the rules, a clumsy speaker can persuade more effectively than a slick, polished orator.  A company can create a powerful brand identity and grow sales without spending millions of dollars on advertising.  A leader who understands and lives these rules can persuade people to follow, even if they don’t look or sound like a charismatic leader.

The final test of any communications should be, “Has it persuaded someone to do something?”  Communication works when it persuades.  If it doesn’t persuade, it doesn’t communicate.

Therefore here are just a few of the new rules – intended to challenge your communications approach, and perhaps help you become more persuasive.

 

Seven New Rules of Persuasion

1. Be what you are.
   Pretending you’re something that you are not is not only dishonest; it undermines your ability to persuade.  A speaker with a poor vocabulary that tries to impress with “big words” will appear less intelligent.  A speaker that says, “I’m not that bright, but here’s what I know,” creates credibility.  A company that promotes itself with impossibly grand or superlative statements can seem disingenuous, while a direct, honest, and simple statement can become far more inspirational – if it’s real. 

   But it’s difficult to communicate what you are if you don’t know what that is. Much of my time as consultant is spent helping companies and individuals understand their strengths, weaknesses and differentiators.  Understand – then be what you are.

   Persuade authentically.

2. Tell the Truth.
   One should be honest, not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because it is more persuasive.   Few believe a person who only talks about how great they are; everyone believes someone who can communicate their own limitations. 

   And the limitations can usually demonstrate an attractive strength.  For example, “Our airline only serves peanuts, but the flight will be inexpensive.”

   Persuade honestly.

3. Differentiation Means Different
   It’s generally understood that differentiation helps clarify value; that customers need to know how you, your product or vision is different and perhaps better than the alternatives.  In practice, however, most communicate how similar they are to others.  This often happens when a company or person doesn’t understand what makes them different, or when say what they think their audience wants to hear.  That’s why, just as in rule #1, it’s essential to understand who you are and what makes you different. 

   Differences are persuasive because they stand out, because they draw attention, because when making a choice between similar options, only the differences are important. 

   Persuade differently.

4. One Thing
   A speech, an advertisement, a sales pitch – should always be about One Thing, because that is all your potential listener can act on or remember at any one time.  Multiple themes diffuse the communication and its effect.  

   The temptation “to educate” or to communicate every detail of a subject must be avoided at all costs.  Instead, select the most persuasive thesis, and then support that thesis with three of the most persuasive facts.

   Persuade single-mindedly.

5. “The good, if brief, twice good; the bad, if little, less bad.”
   The above rule was actually formulated by the seventeenth century Jesuit priest and philosopher, Baltasar Gracian.  It speaks for itself.  

   Persuade briefly.

6. Lather, Rinse, Repeat…as Needed
   This rule was lifted from the back of a shampoo bottle, but also applies to persuasion.  The greater a change one asks people to make, the more often they will have to be exposed to and reflect upon the persuasive argument.  But don’t just say the same thing over and over again.  If someone hears an idea from multiple perspectives, in different contexts, and at different times, they are more likely to take that idea on as their own. 

   Persuade repeatedly.

Give credit away
The most persuasive idea is the one we come up with ourselves.  If that is the case, the most effective persuader will work to make everyone believe it is their own idea.  Holding on to credit for a great idea is not as important as getting people to do what you want them to do.

Persuade humbly.

Innovation driven by a marketing point of view

Is marketing spinning?  

Or is it something else?

Can it be about a new context, a new purpose?

Can it be about changing processes to better suit a hungry market?

Can it be about transformation…even innovation?

Branson Powers, Inc. helps B2B and professional services firms innovate products, markets and process by starting with customers and clients.  Just as a tree falling in the forest may not make a sound if no one is there to hear it — innovations, new products and new ventures really don’t make a difference if customers aren’t willing and eager to buy them.