Is Customer Obsession a Two-Way Street At Your Company?

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

One of my favorite ways to measure a customer’s satisfaction level with a company or brand is by using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) question, which is, “On a scale of zero to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague?” If the customer answers with a nine or a 10, they are known as a “promoter.” The insight is obvious. The customer experience was good enough for them to recommend the company. That would be sufficient if all you were interested in was customer satisfaction, but taking this to the next level is to wonder if the customer will actually recommend the company to another person.

That’s what led Marbue Brown, founder of Customer Obsession Advantage (COA), to create a study. His goal was to find out what type of customer would go from saying they would recommend a company to actually doing so. The COA interviewed more than 1,200 consumers who rated 22 recognized brands to compare customers classified as NPS promoters and customers who were obsessed with a brand.

Consider the following findings from the COA study:

82% of obsessed customers say they will recommend you to others.
42% report they have already recommended you more than five times in the past year.
44% say they always/usually share their feelings about the company with others when given the opportunity.
26% say they have placed online reviews.
88% say they will “absolutely” repurchase in the next 12 months.

These are more than just findings. These are behaviors. Consider that 42% of customers have already recommended the company or brand five or more times in the past year. That’s huge! Or, that 26% placed online reviews. How would you like one in four customers to leave positive reviews about you? (Rhetorical question). These are significant actions that create positive word-of-mouth marketing moments.

Whatever metric you have chosen to measure customer satisfaction— NPS, CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), CES (Customer Effort Score), Time Well Spent, etc.—they are all good tools that serve a purpose and provide important information, but they must be used for more than vanity. A high NPS is just a number, and it should offer more than bragging rights. While it’s nice to know you’re making your customers happy enough to recommend you, leave reviews, etc., it’s more important to recognize that these high scores are opportunities to take action. In other words, actions speak louder than words. A high NPS does not guarantee a customer will promote your business. You must determine if they are obsessed with your brand. While the customer with a high COA score may promote without prompting, why take a chance that they won’t?

For example, a high NPS is especially powerful in the B2B world, where salespeople often call on their customers. When a customer gives a high score, follow up with a phone call or personalized email to thank them for the high score and ask them, “In our survey, you mentioned you would recommend us. Would you be willing to share the names or make introductions to those people?” You may be pleasantly surprised at the positive responses you get from customers who are obsessed with your company.

The insights from Brown’s COA study highlight the behaviors of obsessed customers. The challenge is for us to take traditional metrics like NPS, CSAT and others to another level. A willingness to recommend (a Net Promoter) is just another way to measure customer satisfaction unless you do something with the data. The magic happens when this willingness turns into a tangible action that includes repeated recommendations, online reviews and a customer who says, “I’ll be back” and means it! That’s the difference between a willingness to promote and customer obsession.

Image Credits: Pexels

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com

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Next Generation Leadership Traits and Characteristics

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Next Generation Leadership Traits and Characteristics

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

What are the traits and characteristics for a new generation of leaders, those who will shape the future in this sea of uncertainty?

To me, this is more about mindset than age. However, the mindset which I hint at below and that I believe we need more of reside well within the younger generation.

Thus, we could see a higher number of younger executives in the coming years even though they lack the leadership experience and skills that have been normal for leaders in their roles. They need to learn fast and hopefully do this while being surrounded with experiences in different ways.

I think this will be most prominent in Asia and even parts of Africa and South America where there is a stronger belief in the future compared to Europe and even the USA with its stronger sentiment of complacency as well as many overwhelming challenges.

Many current executives will of course also develop in good ways so I suggest we look for traits and characteristics in both groups such as:

Holistic point of view (intrapreneurial skills)
Understanding of psychological safety and the growth mindset (and ability to lead with and through this)
Ability to constructively handle conflict
Optimism, passion and drive
Curiosity and belief in change
Tolerance for / ability to deal with uncertainty
Adaptive fast learner with sense of urgency
Talent for networking / strategic influencing

The desired end-game? Leaders who are capable of the almost super-human task of both managing day-to-day activities and shaping the future.

Get the Right People on the Bus

By shaping the future, I mean the ability to thrive with transformation/change, apply new ways of working and improve collaboration capabilities while pursing new business opportunities and innovation.

Just a discussion starter. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels, Stefan Lindegaard

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Predicting Unintended Consequences

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The 93% Rule

Predicting Unintended Consequences

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Unintended consequences often catch us off guard despite their predictability. The moment they occur, we gasp in shock, shake our heads, and look at each other in wide-eyed horror at this thing that just happened that we could never ever ever have anticipated.

Yet, when (if) we do an After-Action Review, we often realize that these consequences were not entirely unforeseeable. In fact, had we anticipated them, we might have made different decisions.

The Unintended Consequences of Spreadsheets

In 1800 BCE, ancient Babylonians started recording data by scratching grids and columns onto clay tablets, and the spreadsheet was born. Over the millennia, we went from clay tablets to papyrus to parchment and then paper.

Fast forward to 1963 when R. Brian Walsh of Marquette University ported the Business Computer Language (BCL) program to an IBM 7040, and electronic spreadsheets became a reality. The introduction of VisiCalc by Apple in 1979 revolutionized spreadsheet capabilities, followed by Lotus 123 and Microsoft Excel. Today, spreadsheets are ubiquitous in education, business operations, financial markets, budgeting, and even personal inventories.

Unintended yet predictable consequences

While spreadsheets have undoubtedly enhanced efficiency and accuracy compared to traditional methods like clay tablets or hand-drawn tables on parchment, their ease of use has inadvertently led to complacency.

We stopped engaging in a multi-millennial habit of discussing, debating, and deciding before making a spreadsheet. We started flippantly asking people to create spreadsheets and providing little, if any, guidance because “it’s easy to make changes and run scenarios.”

This shift resulted in a reliance on automated models and a lack of shared assumptions or analytical rigor in decision-making processes.

Of course, these behaviors were never intended. They were, however, very predictable.

93% of Human Behavior is predictable .

Research spanning disciplines as varied as network scientists, anthropology, neuropsychology, and paleontology shines a light on how truly predictable we are.

Here are some examples:

Emotions before Reason: Ask someone if they make decisions based on their motivations, aspirations, and fears and use data to justify the decisions, and they’ll tell you no. Ask them the last time someone else made a decision that “made no sense,” and you’ll listen to a long list of examples.

Small gains now are better than big gains later: Thoughtfully planning before using solutions like spreadsheets, word processing, email, and instant messaging could save us time at work and help us get home 30 minutes earlier or work a few hours less on the weekend. But saving a few seconds now by brain-dumping into Word, setting up a “flexible” spreadsheet, and firing off a text feels much better.

Confidence > Realism: We’ve all been in meetings where the loudest voice or the most senior person’s opinion carried the day. As we follow their lead, we ignore signs that we’re wrong and explain away unexpected and foreboding outcomes until we either wake up to our mistakes or adjust to our new circumstances.

Predict the 93%. Create for the 7%

Acknowledging the predictability of human behavior is not an endorsement of stereotypes but a recognition of our innate cognitive processes. By incorporating this understanding into design, innovation, and decision-making processes, we better anticipate potential outcomes and mitigate unintended consequences.

While 93% of human behavior may follow predictable patterns rooted in evolutionary instincts, focusing on the remaining 7% allows for the exploration of unique behaviors and novel solutions. By embracing both aspects of human nature, we can navigate challenges more effectively and anticipate a broader range of outcomes in our endeavors, leading to informed decision-making and value creation.

Now, if I could only get Excel to stop auto-converting numbers into date/time format.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Value Doesn’t Disappear

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It Shifts From One Place to Another

Value Doesn't Disappear

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

A few years ago, I published an article about no-code software platforms, which was very well received. Before long, however, I began to get angry — and sometimes downright nasty — comments from software engineers who were horrified by the notion that you can produce software without actually understanding the code behind it.

Of course, no-code platforms don’t obviate the need for software engineers, but rather automate basic tasks so that amateurs can design applications by themselves. These platforms are, necessarily, limited but can increase productivity dramatically and help line managers customize technology to fit the task at hand.

Similarly, when FORTRAN, the first real computer language, was invented, many who wrote machine code objected, much like the software engineers did to my article. Yet Fortran didn’t destroy computer programming, but democratized and expanded it. The truth is that value never disappears. It just shifts to another place and that’s what we need to learn to focus on.

Why Robots Aren’t Taking Our Jobs

Ever since the financial crisis we’ve been hearing about robots taking our jobs. Yet just the opposite seems to be happening. In fact, we increasingly find ourselves in a labor shortage. Most tellingly, the shortage is especially acute in manufacturing, where automation is most pervasive. So what’s going on?

The fact is that automation doesn’t actually replace jobs, it replaces tasks. To understand how this works, think about the last time you walked into a highly automated Apple store, which actually employs more people than a typical retail location of the same size. They aren’t there to ring up your purchase any faster, but to do all the things that a machine can’t do, like answer your questions and solve your problems.

A few years ago I came across an even more stark example when I asked Vijay Mehta, Chief Innovation Officer for Consumer Information Services at Experian about the effect that shifting to the cloud had on his firm’s business. The first order effect was simple, they needed a lot less technicians to manage its infrastructure and those people could easily be laid off.

Yet they weren’t. Instead Experian shifted a lot of that talent and expertise to focus on creating new services for its customers. One of these, a cloud enabled “data on demand” platform called Ascend has since become one of the $4 billion company’s most profitable products.

Now think of what would have happened if Experian had merely seen cloud technology as an opportunity to cut costs. Sure, it would have fattened its profit margins temporarily, but as its competitors moved to the cloud that advantage would have soon been eroded and, without new products its business would soon decline.

The Outsourcing Dilemma

Another source of disruption in the job market has been outsourcing. While no one seemed to notice when large multinational corporations were outsourcing blue-collar jobs to low cost countries, now so-called “gig economy” sites like Upwork and Fiverr are doing the same thing for white collar professionals like graphic designers and web developers.

So you would expect to see a high degree of unemployment for those job categories, right? Actually no. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects demand for graphic designers to increase 4% by 2026 and web developers to increase 15%. The site Mashable recently named web development as one of 8 skills you need to get hired in today’s economy.

It’s not hard to see why. While it is true that a skilled professional in a low-cost country can do small projects of the same caliber as those in high cost countries, those tasks do not constitute a whole job. For large, important projects, professionals must collaborate closely to solve complex problems. It’s hard to do that through text messages on a website.

So while it’s true that many tasks are being outsourced, the number of jobs has actually increased. Just like with automation, outsourcing doesn’t make value disappear, but shifts it somewhere else.

The Social Impact

None of this is to say that the effects of technology and globalization hasn’t been real. While it’s fine to speak analytically about value shifting here and there, if a task that you spent years to learn to do well becomes devalued, you take it hard. Economists have also found evidence that disruptions in the job market have contributed to political polarization.

The most obvious thing to do is retrain workers that have been displaced, but it turns out that’s not so simple. In Janesville, a book which chronicles a small town’s struggle to recover from the closing of a GM plant, author Amy Goldstein found that the workers that sought retraining actually did worse than those that didn’t.

When someone loses their job, they don’t need training. They need another job and removing yourself from the job market to take training courses can have serious costs. Work relationships begin to decay and there is no guarantee that the new skills you learn will be in any more demand than the old ones you already had.

In fact, Peter Capelli at the Wharton School argues that the entire notion of a skills gap in America is largely a myth. One reason that there is such a mismatch between the rhetoric about skills and the data is that the most effective training often comes on the job from an employer. It is augmenting skills, not replacing them that creates value.

At the same time, increased complexity in the economy is making collaboration more important, so often the most important skills workers need to learn are soft skills, like writing, listening and being a better team player.

You Can’t Compete With A Robot By Acting Like One

The future is always hard to predict. While it was easy to see that Amazon posed a real problem for large chain bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, it was much less obvious that small independent bookstores would thrive. In much the same way, few saw that ten years after the launch of the Kindle that paper books would surge amid a decline in e-books.

The one overriding trend over the past 50 years or so is that the future is always more human. In Dan Schawbel’s recent book, Back to Human, the author finds that the antidote for our overly automated age is deeper personal relationships. Things like trust, empathy and caring can’t be automated or outsourced.

There are some things a machine will never do. It will never strike out in a little league game, have its heart broken or see its child born. That makes it hard — impossible really — for a machine ever to work effectively with humans as a real person would. The work of humans is increasingly to work with other humans to design work for machines.

That why perhaps the biggest shift in value is from cognitive to social skills. The high paying jobs today have less to do with the ability to retain facts or manipulate numbers (we now use a computer for those things), but require more deep collaboration, teamwork and emotional intelligence.

So while even the most technically inept line manager can now easily produce an application that it would have once required a highly skilled software engineer, to design the next generation of technology, we need engineers and line managers to work more closely together.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credits: Pixabay

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Celebrating World Creativity and Innovation Day 2024

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Embracing Creativity and Innovation: A Pathway to Progress

Celebrating World Creativity and Innovation Day 2024

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In a world that is constantly changing, the only constant is the need for creativity and innovation. As we celebrate World Creativity and Innovation Day, it’s essential to recognize that these two forces are the lifeblood of human advancement and the cornerstone of sustainable development.

Creativity is not just about artistic endeavors; it’s a mindset that enables us to see the world differently, to challenge the status quo, and to envision what could be. Innovation, on the other hand, is the process of turning those creative ideas into tangible solutions that drive value and impact.

Recent Innovations Shaping Our World

We live in an era where innovation is not just about creating new products; it’s about redefining possibilities. Let’s look at some recent innovations that exemplify this spirit:

The Leap in AI: With the advent of models like OpenAI’s GPT-4, we’ve seen a quantum leap in artificial intelligence 1. These AI systems are not only transforming how we interact with technology but also how we solve complex problems and generate creative content.
Sustainable Energy Solutions: Innovations like salt-water-powered electric generators are paving the way for sustainable energy solutions, demonstrating that we can harness the power of nature in harmony with technological advancement 2.
Advances in Medical Technology: The development of the COVID-19 vaccines in record time is a testament to human ingenuity and the collaborative spirit of the global scientific community 3. It shows that when faced with a common enemy, creativity and innovation can lead to groundbreaking solutions.

The Role of Creativity in Innovation

Creativity is the starting point of innovation. It’s about looking beyond what is and imagining what could be. It’s about connecting the dots in new ways and bringing diverse perspectives together to spark breakthrough ideas.

As we observe World Creativity and Innovation Day, let’s remember that each one of us has the potential to contribute to this creative process. Whether it’s through developing new technologies, designing more sustainable systems, or simply finding better ways to do our daily tasks, we all have a role to play.

Fostering a Culture of Innovation

To truly harness the power of creativity and innovation, we must foster a culture that encourages experimentation, embraces failure as a learning opportunity, and rewards out-of-the-box thinking. Organizations and societies that cultivate these values will be the ones leading the charge in the 21st century.

Conclusion

As we honor the spirit of World Creativity and Innovation Day, let’s commit to nurturing our creative abilities and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Let’s continue to innovate for a better world, one where sustainable development and human-centric solutions lead the way.

Remember, creativity is not the privilege of a select few; it’s a universal trait that we all share. And innovation is not just about technology; it’s about improving lives and creating a future that we can all look forward to.

Let’s keep the flame of creativity and innovation burning bright, for it is the beacon that will guide us to a brighter tomorrow.

This article aims to capture the essence of Braden Kelley’s thought leadership, emphasizing the importance of creativity and innovation in driving progress and addressing global challenges. It’s a call to action for all of us to embrace our creative potential and contribute to a more innovative and sustainable future.

Bottom line: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Bing Dall-E

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What Have We Learned About Digital Transformation?

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What Have We Learned About Digital Transformation?

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

We are well into our first decade of digital transformation, with both the successes and the scars to show for it, and we can see there is a long way to go. Realistically, there is probably never a finish line, so I think it is time for us to pause and take stock of what we have learned, and how best we can proceed from here. Here are three lessons to take to heart.

Lesson 1: There are three distinct levels of transformation, and operating model transformation is the one that deserves the most attention.

Geoffrey Moore Three Models

The least disruptive transformation is to the infrastructure model. This should be managed within the Productivity Zone, where to be fair, the disruption will be considerable, but it should not require much in the way of behavior change from the rest of the enterprise. Moving from data centers to cloud computing is a good example, as are enabling mobile applications and remote work centers. The goal here is to make employees more efficient while lowering total cost of IT ownership. These transformations are well underway, and there is little confusion about what next steps to take.

By contrast, the most disruptive transformation is to the business model. Here a company may be monetizing information derived from its operating model, as the SABRE system did for American Airlines, or overlaying a digital service on top of its core offering, as the automotive makers are seeking to do with in-car entertainment. The challenge here is that the economics of the new model have little in common with the core model, which creates repercussions both with internal systems and external ecosystem relationships. Few of these transformations to date can be said to be truly successful, and my view is they are more the exception than the rule.

The place where digital transformation is having its biggest impact is on the operating model. Virtually every sector of the economy is re-engineering its customer-facing processes to take advantage of ubiquitous mobile devices interacting with applications hosted in the cloud. These are making material changes to everyday interactions with customers and partners in the Performance Zone, where the priority is to improve effectiveness first, efficiency second. The challenge is to secure rapid, consistent, widespread adoption of the new systems from every employee who touches them. More than any other factor, this is the one that separates the winners from the losers in the digital transformation game.

Lesson 2: Re-engineer operating models from the outside in, not the inside out.

A major challenge that digital transformation at the operating model level must overcome is the inertial resistance of the existing operating model, especially where it is embedded in human behaviors. Simply put, people don’t like change. (Well, actually, they all want other people to change, just not themselves.) When we take the approach of internal improvement, things go way too slowly and eventually lose momentum altogether.

The winning approach is to focus on an external forcing function. For competition cultures, the battle cry should be, this new operating model poses an existential threat to our future. Our competitors are eating our lunch. We need to change, and we need to do it now! For collaboration cultures, the call to action should be, we are letting our customers down because we are too hard to do business with. They love our offers, but if we don’t modernize our operating model, they are going to take their business elsewhere. Besides, with this new digital model, we can make our offers even more effective. Let’s get going!

This is where design thinking comes in. Forget the sticky notes and lose the digital whiteboards. This is not about process. It is about walking a mile in the other person’s shoes, be that an end user, a technical buyer, a project sponsor, or an implementation partner, spending time seeing what hoops they have to go through to implement or use your products or simply to do business with you. No matter how good you were in the pre-digital era, there will be a ton of room for improvement, but it has to be focused on their friction issues, not yours. Work backward from their needs and problems, in other words, not forward from your intentions or desires.

Lesson 3: Digital transformations cannot be pushed. They must be pulled.

This is the hardest lesson to learn. Most executive teams have assumed that if they got the right digital transformation leader, gave them the title of Chief Transformation Officer, funded them properly, and insured that the project was on time, on spec, and on budget, that would do the trick. It makes total sense. It just doesn’t work.

The problem is one endemic to all business process re-engineering. The people whose behavior needs to change—and change radically—are the ones least comfortable with the program. When some outsider shows up with a new system, they can find any number of things wrong with it and use these objections to slow down deployment, redirect it into more familiar ways, and in general, diminish its impact. Mandating adoption can lead to reluctant engagement or even malicious compliance, and the larger the population of people involved, the more likely this is to occur.

So what does work? Transformations that are driven by the organization that has to transform. These start with the executive in charge who must galvanize the team to take up the challenge, to demand the digital transformation, and to insert it into every phase of its deployment. In other words, the transformation has to be pulled, not pushed.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There is still plenty of work on the push side involved, and that will require a strong leader. But at the end of the day, success will depend more on the leader of the consuming organization than that of the delivery team.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels, Geoffrey Moore

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Embrace the Art of Getting Started

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Embrace the Art of Getting Started

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

What do we do next? I don’t know

What has been done before?
What does it do now?
What does it want to do next?
If it does that, who cares?

Why should we do it? I don’t know.

Will it increase the top line? If not, do something else.
Will it increase the bottom line? If so, let someone else do it.
What’s the business objective?

Who will buy it? I don’t know.

- How will you find out?
- What does it look like when you know they’ll buy it?
- Why do you think it’s okay to do the work before you know they’ll buy it?

What problem must be solved? I don’t know.

- - How will you define the problem?
  - Why do you think it’s okay to solve the problem before defining it?
  - Why do you insist on solving the wrong problem? Don’t you know that ready, fire, aim is bad for your career?
  - Where’s the functional coupling? When will you learn about Axiomatic Design?
  - Where is the problem? Between which two system elements?
  - When does the problem happen? Before what? During what? After what?
  - Will you separate in time or space?
  - When will you learn about TRIZ?

Who wants you to do it? I don’t know.

- - How will you find out?
  - When will you read all the operating plans?
  - Why do you think it’s okay to start the work before knowing this?

Who doesn’t want you to do it? I don’t know.

- - How will you find out?
  - Who looks bad if this works?
  - Who is threatened by the work?
  - Why do you think it’s okay to start the work before knowing this?

What does it look like when it’s done? I don’t know.

Why do you think it’s okay to start the work before knowing this?

What do you need to be successful? I don’t know.

Why do you think it’s okay to start the work before knowing this?

Starting is essential, but getting ready to start is even more so.

Image credit: misterinnovation.com

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Never Stop Looking for Improvement

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Never Stop Looking for Improvement

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

If it’s working fine, why mess with it?

Well, whatever “it” is may work just fine, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be better.

This idea came to me as I read an article about United Airlines changing the way passengers board the plane. Most airlines put passengers in groups and call them in order. United will continue doing this but make changes to some of the groups. First-class passengers and higher-level frequent fliers won’t notice, but there will be a change once Group 4 is called. Passengers with window seats will board first, followed by passengers in middle seats, and eventually, passengers with aisle seats. This new process will save two minutes.

Now, you might be thinking, “Two minutes. Big deal!” But, in the airline business, two minutes is a big deal. A mismanaged boarding process could delay the departure and cause disruptions throughout the day. So, while two minutes may not seem like much, the goal is to always look for ways to streamline an often chaotic process.

Improvement Cartoon of Shep Hyken

This story has at least two lessons. First, every company should tinker with what’s working by experimenting and looking for better ways to do “what they’ve always done,” even if it’s working. And second, small changes can add up to make a bigger difference when combined.

So, you have two choices:

Do it the way you’ve always done it. Don’t question it. If it works, don’t try to change it. Unfortunately, many companies operate this way and miss opportunities to improve.
Always look to improve everything, even when it’s working well. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been doing something that works, come back on a regular basis – maybe annually – and take a closer look. This is an excellent way to use a Journey Map. Look at every interaction point a customer has with your organization and ask, “Is there a way to make it better?” While there may not be a better way today, keep asking the question; you might find one over time.

Zig Ziglar, the famous motivational speaker, used to tell a story of a little girl who asked her mom, “Why do we cut the end off the roast before we put it in the oven?” Mom answered, “Because that’s how your grandmother taught me to cook it.” So, the little girl went to her grandmother and asked the same question. Grandma answered, “Because that’s how your great-grandmother taught me.” So, the little girl went to her great-grandmother and asked the same question. Great Grandma responded, “Because back then, the ovens were smaller than they are today, so we had to cut off the end to get it to fit.”

The moral of the story is if something worked yesterday, that doesn’t mean it’s the best thing to do today. Always look for improvement.

Image Credits: Shep Hyken, Pexels

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Ignite Innovation with These 3 Key Ingredients

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Ignite Innovation with These 3 Key Ingredients

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

The team at FROM has worked with dozens and dozens of companies to create innovative new products, processes, and channels to connect with customers. It’s very rewarding work for many reasons, one of which is the incredible people we get to work with at our clients. In fact, we find over and over that our clients have teams with tremendous knowledge, vision, and passion to serve their customers. And yet, it can sometimes take an outside force (like us) to unleash their full creative potential or to catalyze the action need to move an idea forward along the pathway of value. Why is that?

Having observed many companies go through transformations that yielded massively innovative thinking and action from teams that were previously struggling, the difference usually boils down to something that had been missing in the company’s culture, processes, or environment. But what?

Consider this analogy. To create fire you must have three key ingredients:

Some type of fuel
Oxygen
A spark or source of heat to start the reaction.

These ingredients are all necessary for the reaction to occur. If any is missing, nothing happens. The dormant potential is not realized.

It’s a similar pattern with sparking innovation. There are three key ingredients. When these are present, amazing things can happen. And when any is missing, there’s no reward structure or corporate mandate that can create the magic.

The human mind is an incredible problem-solving machine, and it works best when given a very clear and precise goal.

1. Focused Objective

The first ingredient is a Focused Objective. This is the SPARK of innovation. The human mind is an incredible problem-solving machine, and it works best when given a very clear and precise goal. Defining the right objective that you want your innovation team to churn on is the first step in empowering them. If you want your team to create a more innovative doorknob, that’s somewhat specific. However figuring out how to create a doorknob that looks like brass, lasts for at least 10 years with normal residential use, and can retail for no more than $19.99 is a much more specific objective. The brain is more resourceful when it really understands the target it is shooting for.

Where does such specificity come from? We use a concept in our innovation framework that we call Cascading Innovation.

It might have been a prior team’s innovation output to figure out that a $19.99 “faux brass” doorknob is what the market wants. Their specific objective might have been to determine what gaps exist in the doorknob market where the company could generate at least $50M in incremental sales by 2014 through existing retail channels.
That input might have come to them from yet another team whose focus was to figure out which market in residential hardware has the greatest potential for growth over the next 5 years, perhaps they concluded it was doorknobs.

Constraints

When articulating a focused objective, it is very important to clearly define the correct constraints.

On one hand, we want to drive innovation, and so we want to be careful not to state the objective or the problem too much in the terms of the current “legacy” solution to the problem. Henry Ford said, “If I’d asked people what they want, they’d have said a faster horse.” So avoid defining the problem as “a faster horse” versus “a faster way to travel.”

At the same time, all creativity exists within some kind of framework, whether it’s the structure of a haiku poem or a painting created within a defined frame.

What’s fabulous about clear constraints is that once all the constraints are clear, then we can tell the teams with confidence that any solution which solves the problem within the constraints is fair game, even if it looks nothing like what anybody expects. That is very liberating.

Henry Ford said “If I’d asked people what they want they’d have said a faster horse.”

2. Information

The second ingredient to ignite innovation is Information. Relevant information is the FUEL of innovation. Our doorknob team is hopefully populated with some individuals who have some of their own stored information in the form of personal experience in the doorknob biz. But collecting the right additional information and making it easy for the team to organize and internalize it is key. Information might include: competitive examples of other low cost doorknobs which have or have not been successful; market research about consumer needs; materials prices for a variety of different low cost metals along with information about their durability. Figuring out the right information with which to FUEL your team will allow them to burn hotter and longer on the problem.

There are three ways to get the information to feed your team:

The people you choose for the team bring different backgrounds and experience to the table. On the projects on which we consult, significant thought goes into the right composition of the client’s innovation team to bring different backgrounds, knowledge, personalities and perspective to bear.

Once assembled, each team member’s individual knowledge will be an information resource to him/herself, as a member of the team. The team’s collective knowledge will be a resource to the entire team if you structure the collaboration to foster knowledge sharing.
Secondary research such as market studies, government statistics, materials analysis, etc can provide critical reference. Gathering the full gamut of available information and structuring it so that it is easily digested and referenced can be a sizable undertaking, but is critical to giving the team both information that may yield flashes of valuable insight as well as the tools they need to evaluate and prioritize ideas as they are generated.
Primary research that your team participates in, such as talking to customers and building and testing physical prototypes, is another way to get the information to fuel your team. There is no substitute for personal experience.

You can also think of two key “buckets” of information that together form the ideal fuel.

1. Knowledge of the problem space

Who are the users for whom we are innovating? What do we understand about their needs?
Has this problem been solved before or have prior attempts been made? What was the approach and what were the results?
How can a potential solution’s effectiveness be measured? How will we know when the problem is solved?
Has anyone solved or attempted to solve a similar problem which may be instructive?

2. Knowledge of the resources that are available to create the solution

Details on the rules regarding any constraints that must be met for a successful approach (e.g. regulatory restrictions or distribution restrictions)
Specific characteristics of different materials or processes, that either enable or hamper their use in particular ways
Information on new technologies that can be leveraged in the solution

There is a wonderful scene in Apollo 13 where the team has to figure out how to keep the astronauts alive until re-entry even though the Co2 “scrubbers” in the command module have failed, causing the air to become slowly poisoned. The leader of the Mission Control team tasked with solving this problem dumps onto the table all the “stuff” they have in the command module and tells the team “we have to figure out how to make this (the large square filters they have) fit into the hole for this (the smaller round filters that have failed) using nothing but this (the pile of miscellaneous stuff on the table which mirrors the available material in the command module). Watch this one minute clip it’s a great example of a clear focused objective with clear information about the resources available to solve the problem:

3. Freedom

And so what is the OXYGEN we need to finish the recipe? Freedom is the OXYGEN of innovation. What do we mean by freedom? In daily “business as usual” there are a variety of things that hold us back — which suppress the natural release of our latent creativity just as lack of oxygen snuffs out a campfire. Here are a few of the barriers to freedom and how we overcome them.

Fear. Fear of looking foolish and fear of political repercussions are the two greatest risks to innovation. These fears hold back new ideas and honest discourse regarding ideas that do come forth. These are best overcome with culture. In our innovation workshops we stress rules such as “leave rank at the door,” and highlight the value of bad ideas.
Patterns. We all have certain patterns we follow. Those patterns are the grooves in the road that make it hard to find a new path and they are the shackles that keep us from thinking freely. There are many ways to break patterns. Some techniques we use in our innovation frameworks and workshops include: working in a different type of workspace, music, toys, time compression, physical activity/games and mixing teams in unexpected ways.
Assumptions. People have assumptions about what can or can’t be done, what the company will or won’t allow, what the market will or won’t accept. However most successful innovations break existing assumptions. One of the reasons its important to state the problem and its constraints with great care is that in doing so we let the innovation team know those are all the assumptions they should respect, anything else should be challenged. We also conduct exercises specifically designed to remove assumptions. One great example is the “Google exercise.” It works like this. People perceive Google as innovative. So we tell people: “Google just bought your company, and they put their most innovative team on the problem. How would they solve it?” (and it can work with Apple or Facebook as well). This context puts people outside their normal assumptions about what is possible in their environment and even, strangely enough, frees them from their own limiting beliefs about their own imaginations. The team may come back and say, “Well the guys at Google would do this wild innovative thing, but that’s the sort of thing we’d never come up with here at Acme corporation.” Uh oh, tricked you! You just did.
Faith. The last component of freedom is faith. A lack of faith can stifle innovation. Teams must believe that solutions to the challenge exist and that they are more than capable of arriving at them.

So those are the three ingredients to ignite innovation: a clear set of objectives to spark the FIRE, a rich set of information to FUEL it, and an atmosphere of freedom acting as OXYGEN so the flame can breathe.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credits: Unsplash

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Positive Power of Negative Emotions Drive Change

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Positive Power of Negative Emotions Drive Change

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

You want to make life better for others. This desire is reflected in the optimism and positivity of your language – create value, love the problem, and delight the customer. But making life better requires change, and, as the adage goes, “People want change, but they don’t want to be changed.”

You are confident that the solution you created will make life better and that the change people need to make is quite small and painless, well worth the dramatic improvement you offer. Yet they resist. No amount of explaining, showing, convincing, or cajoling changes their mind. What else can you do?

To quote Darth Vader, “Give yourself to the Dark Side. It is the only way to save your friends.”

“If only you knew the power of the Dark Side…”

The Dark Side is populated by “negative” emotions like anger, fear, and frustration, which are incredibly powerful.

Consider that:

Negative events are remembered more accurately and in greater detail than positive events
Six positive comments are required to offset the effect of one negative comment
60% of people make purchases fueled by their fear of missing out (FOMO)

Unfortunately, these are also some of the first emotions experienced when confronting change.

Change requires people to let go of what they know in exchange for the promise of something better. This immediately triggers Loss Aversion, the cognitive bias in which the pain of losing is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining.

As a result, people won’t let go of what they know until the pain of holding on becomes unbearable. When you point out the problems and pain of the current situation, you help people understand and experience the unbearableness of the current situation.

“Anger, fear, aggression; the Dark Side of the Force are they”

Not every “negative” emotion elicits the same behavior, so carefully choose the one to tap into.

Fear motivates people to seek safety, which can be good if your solution truly offers a safer alternative. It’s a motivator used well by companies such as Volvo, SimpliSafe, and Graco. But lean on it too much, and people may feel overwhelmed and remain frozen to the status quo.

Anger motivates people to take risks, which can be good when the change requires bold decisions and dogged persistence. It can be great when it bonds people together to achieve a shared goal or protect a common value. Apple used this emotion to brilliant effect in its famous “1984” commercial announcing the launch of Macintosh. But incite too much anger, and things can get broken and not in a helpful way like Apple’s ad.

Frustration, one of the emotions that often drives aggression, is anger’s polite little sister. When people feel frustrated, they’re likely to act, persistently pursue solutions, and creatively approach and overcome obstacles. But if the change is big, feels scary, and puts their sense of self at risk, frustration isn’t powerful enough to convince people to let go of the old and embrace the new.

“If you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.”

Yoda is incredibly wise, but he gets this one wrong. Using the Dark Side to speak to people’s “negative” emotions doesn’t doom you to a life or career of fear-mongering or inciting violence. Start here, don’t stay here.

Multiple research studies show that positive emotions, like hope and joy, are more powerful than negative ones in maintaining motivation and even enable more creative thinking and problem-solving. By speaking to both negative and positive emotions, the Dark Side and the Light, you enable change by giving people a reason to let go of the past and a future worth reaching for.

When people stop resisting and start reaching to the future you’re offering, change happens, and you realize that Yoda was right, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.”

Image credit: Pixabay

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