Ep 72 Leadership: How to create REAL innovation

In this episode of The Crazy One, Stephen Gates demystifies the overused yet elusive concept of innovation, breaking down why so many companies and teams fall short in making it a reality. Discover the common reasons innovation efforts fail, the essential traits of truly innovative teams, and actionable steps to foster a culture of real creativity and progress in your organization. Tune in to transform the way you approach innovation and start building a team that delivers meaningful impact.

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Transcript

Stephen Gates : 0:00

What's going on everybody, and welcome into the 72nd episode of The Crazy One podcast. As always, I'm your host, Stephen Gates. And this is a show where we talk about creativity, leadership, design, and everything else that helps to empower creative people. Now, be sure you subscribe to the show. So you get those latest episodes whenever those come out. And for all of these shows, you can get the show notes, you can get articles, all kinds of other stuff, head over to the crazy one calm. That's crazy and the number one.com. So man, I've been trying, I've been doing a lot of thinking about how do we want to end the year on the show, what do we want to talk about? What do we need to talk about? What do we need to work on? What are the problems that I honestly see the most? And I started by thinking about all these amazing teams I've been lucky enough to work alongside with this year and I thought about the biggest problems I see them struggle with. And I kept coming back to one topic and one word in particular. And that word was innovation because I think it is patient has got to be easily the most abused, misunderstood, Miss quoted, talked about and not delivered on word in the corporate lexicon. It is bananas because we all talk about it. But so few companies, so few teams, so few people are actually able to create it, there are so few who are actually able to deliver on it. So in this episode, I want to look at first off, why does innovation fail? Because I've seen lots of examples of this. I want to take a look at what are the traits of truly innovative teams? What do they do differently from everybody else? It's how it makes it work or somebody other ones struggle? And then what can you do to start on your team in your company to be able to start fixing all this? What What can we do differently? So those are the three things we're gonna look at today as we look at innovation, and trying to make it a little bit less of a myth, a little bit less of that quote unquote, theater of innovation and something that we all get To actually launch. And I think we need to start with something we probably all know or have seen. But honestly, I think we're afraid to say it out loud. Because after all the companies I've talked with, I've sort of come to this new insight. And I think it's even true whenever I look back over my own work. And it's an insight that I think has been sitting in plain sight. But I don't think that any of us want to say it out loud. And that is for most companies, for most teams, the innovation that that company needs, the innovation that they keep asking for more than likely is going to have to be done in a way that will not be authorized. Now, why is this? Because I think that in many cases, everybody asked for it, they want it but most companies have these antiquated processes antiquated mindsets in place that are going to keep a lot of these companies from really being able to deliver on this and and those processes. I think honestly even fight the ability to create real innovation. those processes don't change. And so we have this intersection, we have this collision between the one for innovation and want for new the one for better. They want to do what we see these disruptive companies doing. But at the end of the day, I think what it is, is that most companies are more afraid of change, than they are becoming disrupted or having their way of working or their their product become obsolete. And it's insane. And then this goes back to the phrase that I've used time and time again, that comfort is the enemy of greatness. This is it in spades. So instead of making real change, what what junk companies do is they change the way they behave, not the way they think they change by launching these kind of like innovation labs or innovation initiatives to make themselves feel better. And I think this basically sort of leads to the the second insight that I think a lot of us don't want to say out loud, is that of all these quote unquote innovation labs or innovation initiatives, the hard truth that most of these are nothing more than expensive PR stunts, they fail in an increment of about 12 to 24 months and create no real value innovation. These are what I will call like, press release innovation. It's something that we can take to the market, we can put out a screenshot and we can, you know, talk about how innovative we're being. Nothing actually launches, the consumer doesn't really see anything that's actually very differentiated. But what we do what our superpower is, what we're really good at, is we're great at rationalizing that mediocrity. We're great at telling ourselves why we are being innovative. It's why you see in so many companies, what they want to benchmark themselves against our other companies in the same industry. I worked in financial services, I worked in hotels, I've worked like you work in tons of other places like in financial services. Your competition isn't isn't another bank if you're if you truly want to be honest, because nobody is opening like Bank A and experiencing that and then going to bank B and experiencing their app and going to bank C and experiencing their app but What they do is they go to Facebook, then they go to Twitter, they go to Instagram, they go to Snapchat, then they go to your app. And that's your real competition. But we don't like that conversation. We don't like that conversation, because that's hard. That's a different standard. That means we can't take comfort in knowing that we're slightly better than our competition. And so these are hard conversations to have. These are hard facts to be able to face. These are hard things that most people don't want to be able to fess up to. What are the real reasons here? Right, because I think those are some of the big overarching things that are going on. What are some of the more nuts and bolts reasons why innovation fails? And I think that there's there's a few really common ones that I see. And I'm curious, as you listen to this, if you can start to think of the times whenever you've seen the same thing. A lot of it is because that innovation work doesn't align with the main product roadmap, it sort of exists off in a vacuum, they want to try different processes, they want to try different things. And so ultimately, what happens is you get that press release, you get that nice interesting looking thing. But since it doesn't align with the large Mission since it doesn't align with the bigger company, the work never finds scale, and it never finds traction. So that's the thing is it goes through this cycle of being very new and very interesting. We're trying all this different stuff, it starts to produce interesting looking work, it starts to become things that we can take to the press, and oh, gee, isn't that interesting? And then there is that Oh, holy shit, how do we actually launch this? Because either now we need to start creating separate apps, separate experiences, separate things, separate design languages, or all these other things. That won't work. And that's a lot of it is is it's it is thinking that innovation needs to be holistically new, new brand new way of talking like all new. But the problem is that such a complete that revolution, not an evolution, again, keeps it from finding scale and from finding traction, and other design teams. I see the design teams I work with, we have a hand in this. Because a lot of times design teams what we want to do is we want to create new, we will create a new design language we will evolve something we want a new tech stack. We want every project To be able to be new to have a new look, because we're tired of working with that design system, we're tired of the same old brand we've seen for years, we're tired of doing that we want new. And I think this is part of the shift I've talked about in the past, as we've gone from visual design to product design, product design does not place the emphasis on the new when it comes to the visual the way that we want it to. And so ultimately, the other mistake that we make is then by doing that new design, now we've created something that has to be designed twice, it gets designed once and that new design language, that new way of doing things and then we realize that well there's a fork in the road, that's going to have to happen because at some point we'd have to change over to the new. Well, nobody wants to pay for that tech doesn't want to invest in it product doesn't want to stop the roadmap to be able to do it. So now that innovation needs to be designed twice. We did it once the first time and now we actually have to do it again, if we will actually want to get into the product. Again, most times most companies don't want to pay for that. The other thing is that we want the output of the that innovation work to be something that can be taken to press or something that shiny So the board of directors knows what we're working on. So the public can see we're innovative, so we can take credit for being this amazing new company. But here the problem is, and the reason why it fails is because you're working for the wrong customer. Because you're not working for your customers, you're working for your board of directors, you're working for an executive, you're working for somebody else as the audience and then whenever it launches, then whenever you try to put it out there, then it doesn't test very well, then nobody wants it, then it's that typical trap. And then everybody sits around scratching their head about well, you know, we did all this really pretty work, but didn't go anywhere. I think the other thing that I see is we have these innovation projects that never go anywhere. So that what happens is that the team, the talent, the all these new people you brought in this new mindset you brought in people from other industries and things like that. It's amazing how quickly unfulfilled inspiration can turn into frustration. Because the work needs to go somewhere. It needs to launch it needs to be more than just a press release or a footnote or a blip or you know a visual in a board. Dec, we want it to actually turn into something not just become this constant mental exercise, and mental gymnastics that doesn't go anywhere. So that the teams are working to get very frustrated, they get very burnout, because you know that your work isn't really work. Again, it's just a press release. But ultimately, I think the biggest thing that I see is that so many of these innovation labs, so many of these innovation initiatives, they should be about learning, not failing learning. And if you're going to learn if you're going to look at how do we want to work with an agile methodology, how do we want to bring in design thinking or design sprints? If we want to look at how do we align the teams differently? If we want to align? How do we look at our requirements to really like any host of these sort of things, that's all great. It's great to be able to go out and push the envelope. It's great to be able to innovate beyond the project in front of you. And we're going to talk about that more in a minute. But, but the thing is, is that you have to understand that this needs to have discipline, you have to have a way of passing that work or passing that learning back to the main organization because it You don't? Like Yes, every company needs that, as I have described with some of my work, you need to be the speedboat in front of the Queen Mary, you need to be the one that gets out in front trying things differently. You need to be the one that's pushing and evolving the organization. But if you don't have a way of passing it back, what goes from being innovation, what goes from being introduced very quickly turns into resentment. Because people will say, Well, look, why are they doing this work? It's not actually helping us in the main company, why are they doing that work? It's not actually making the day to day experience any better, hey, what are they actually producing and that will continue to compound to, again, what starts as the press release was starts is an interesting shiny object. Those voices go from no individual voices to a chorus and the chorus turns into lack of funding, lack of direction, lack of focus, and then all of a sudden, you know, we're just saying look like this was interesting, but, you know, it's two years later, three years later, we still have the same company. We saw the same problems. We learned all this stuff. We don't know how to apply it. We they did this stuff in such a way that was so completely disconnected, we have no idea of how to be able to bring it back. And so as a result, that chorus crushes that team, they go away. And usually about 1218 months later, you know, there's enough of an upswell we need to be more innovative, you know, blah, blah cycle repeats. And as a result of these problems, I've also seen that there's this is a byproduct of this is that you start to see this sort of backlash against everything from innovation, to create a methodologies like design thinking. And I'll be honest that in the articles that I've read, and in the people that I've talked to, will start on that, like design thinking is bullshit thing. I understand why they say it. I'm not saying that they're wrong by any stretch of the imagination. I think it's an under for sure, no, for a understandable frustration, and feeling. But whenever you sit down and looked at their process, to see the methodology, you would see that, that that really wasn't the problem. It was the application. It was the discipline. It was the management of that problem. And that process that really was their problem. They were only two Taking parts and pieces of methodology, they skipped key steps like, you know, keeping the consumer at the center of the work or starting with research and insights or other things that strip the process down to being this just mess every time. Because that's the thing is what we want to do too often, we want to take the shiny parts, we want to take the parts that are getting written about, we only take the parts that align with our process. And here again, we just want to behave a little bit differently. We don't want to change the way that we think. And so then it is going to fail because if you don't have the entire process, you just take parts and pieces. It's like anything if I take a recipe to cook for dinner tonight, and I'm like, Hey, I'm only gonna take you know, I'm only going to use half of the ingredients. I'm going to end up with a dinner that tastes like shit. No surprise, because I don't have all the pieces I didn't follow all the steps. This is no different than that recipe for dinner. And that that's the way that we need to think about it. So we aren't going to be disciplined if we aren't going to go out and buy everything we need. If we're going to cut corners or make shortcuts. Yeah, the food is gonna taste like crap. And then people are gonna get frustrated. There's To be that backlash, and when this happens, innovation and creativity can feel more like madness than a method. And I think it happens to most people, which is why we need to impose discipline, creativity, and management. And here again, I've talked in the past about, Look, I know that process is not the sexiest place in the world to be able to start with a lot of this stuff. But I think if you were to talk about innovation, that's sort of where it needs to start. So whenever I've sat down, and I've thought about, you know, what, what do I see really innovative teams doing whenever I see teams that are shipping really innovative product? What are those sort of critical things that they do? What are the critical behaviors that they have? And it sort of come down to three different categories we're going to talk about? I think the first one is around product, meaning Just what are the tools that they use? I think around practice, meaning what are the processes that they use? And then I think a lot of it comes down to people and people not not only in who you hire, but people in the behaviors that you establish the know that you want to hold everybody to that, I think that makes a really key difference. And the key to all of this is going to be freedom in a framework. Because I think on the one hand, if innovation has too much structure, then it smothers all the creativity. But innovation needs to be about balance. Because if you have too much freedom, you never ship, you have to be able to have an effect on this. Because there's if there's too much process, it's going to smother that original thinking, but you're going to become a slave to the process. But if there is no structure, that just becomes a sort of like open free for all, where you never really are able to get anything done. You're never able to ship anything. So let's go through and look at these three this product practices and people and I did the alliteration with the three P's just to make it easier to remember pick whatever words you want, right like pick whatever words gonna stick for you. But I think that there is a thought to be able to do this, I think around product. It really is how do you how are you using tools that really facilitate and allow for collaboration because as I think as we talk about product design as we talk about creativity as we talk about design We need tools that are gonna allow for an inclusive design process, we need to be able to bring more people into this process. But I think that the tools are a spectacularly of doing that without losing control of your process. Now, I think obviously, I've got a horse in this race. I again, I think as you look at the workflow of what we're doing at envision, I do feel like that is sort of the better way in a smarter way being able to work, as opposed to whenever you talk to most designers, they have this incredibly disjointed workflow across, you know, whatever it is 510 20 different tools, a lot of different ways of working, nobody's on the same page. And so it makes it just so much harder to be able to come together and do things because everything's in a different format of people are working in a different way or somebody erased the whiteboard. Like there's all this sort of stuff. And so I think, a lot of cases it is also seeing them in and I think there continues to be a shift in the industry, away from a file away from a file that sits on your desktop. I think you increasingly are seeing a lot of this more sort of cloud based way of looking at things and obviously this started with Google Docs and Google Sheets and a lot, a lot of that sort of stuff. Right. But I think that a lot of it really does allow you to be much more collaborative to be able to let everybody come together. Because I think the other reality is, is that the idea that teams are always going to be sitting with each other, the idea that everyone's always going to be in the same office, or the same place, or whatever that is, is increasingly small. The world is becoming a smaller place, companies are becoming more global teams are becoming more distributed. And this is a major, major problem that I see so many of them, you know, not working together. And so you'll see multiple initiatives, multiple teams working on the exact same thing, solving the exact same problem not talking to each other. These are real problems. And I think this is why really holistically looking at how do you start to invest in cloud tools? And I would, I would tell you to go back like listen to the episode I did on remote work. There's a lot in there about how do you go through and do that. But look at your products, look at the things that you're using, and this can be everything from sticky notes and Sharpies up to the digital tools that you're using to build products, anything in between but but look at what are those sorts of things and ask yourself Is this really making collaboration? Is this really making innovation better? Or are we just putting together a whole series of workarounds? That really, at the end of the day, yeah, we can justify whatever we want. But it's not really helping. And so I think just take the time, no matter what tool set you're using, again, I don't care what it is. But just take the time to look at that and start to think, is this really helping me or not? So now, let's go. And let's take a look at practices. And this is going to be much more about the processes you use. And to be clear, I think that as we talk about practices, and as we talk about people, you need both of these things. This is not an either or because one without the other. And what you're trying to work on the innovation you're trying to create, will collapse because of it is just practice. If it is just process. People don't understand how to connect with it. They don't understand how to bring it to life, it becomes something where it's a little bit more too much of a paint by numbers sort of a thing where you become a slave to The process and you remove individual thinking, people, on the other hand, the cultural piece, you need this. But here again, if all I have is culture without any structure without any way of doing things, then that also becomes a problem because there isn't a consistent way for me able to do this, there isn't a way for me to be able to time box things to be able to put, you know, an understanding of what does success look like. So you're going to need to work on both of these, you need to work on the practices and the people one way or the other, not going to work. But as we look at practices, I think that I sat down to try to think about whenever I think about the teams that do this really well, what do they do really well. The first one starts in the most basic thing in that these are teams that have balance, these are teams that actually work together, because any great idea is going to need to have three parts. It's going to need to be feasible, which means we can actually build it, it needs to be desirable and the fact that consumers actually want it and it needs to be profitable in the fact that the We'll make the business money essentially, those are the three things that you're looking for. Now, as we look at the three teams that normally work on product work, you have technology, they're very easily the leader on the feasibility part of that equation. You have desirability, which is consumers wanted that is usually then led by the design team and on profitability of is it something that will actually make us money? Is it going to be beneficial to the business that usually products roll. So the thing that you're going to need is to make sure that there's a balance and that there is an inclusion between your tech design and product teams. Often what I will see and I see this in agencies, I see this in internal teams is that one of those is dominant, there is not a balance, if it is tech lead, what happens is that then you get the other two teams product and design will only go through and they only design or they only scope out what they think tech can build. If it is design lead, it tends to be very consumer heavy, but whether or not it moves the needle on product or whether or not it's something can be built becomes a problem. If it's product lead, where it's Business lead, then you end up with things that either consumers don't want, can't be built, or you know, something like that. So this needs to be balanced between the three of them. common problems here are going to be your tech team needs to be a part of this entire process. They may be resistant to this. They may not like this. But this is something that they need to be a part of. And I think that a lot of this is not an unwillingness on their part, let's not overly villainize them for that. I think it's just simply something they're not used to. They're simply used to a construct where you come in and tell them what it is you need to create, and they go do that. So it's just a different metal mob mental model, product. Whenever you work with your product, the product needs to understand that your requirements should not be written in stone just because they come down and say this is what it needs to do. That's great as a starting point, be able to look at that that validate it, have a conversation around it. And then finally, design needs to understand that everyone needs to be involved in this process. Creativity is a team sport. Gone are the days of us sitting in the corner wearing a braid of watercolor or spirit animal telling everybody else how they don't understand. That's not Business reality. And I still see tons of comments on social media and things like that about how much better this process would be if these other teams just weren't a part of the process. It is an arrogance that we can no longer afford. Because for us, those are the teams, those product teams, those tech teams also dictate our success, because of the tech team isn't part of the process. If they don't actually come in to be able to do this sort of stuff. And our work doesn't look right. Whenever it goes out. It product isn't a part of this, then hey, guess what, we don't get funding, we don't get new projects, we don't get new headcount, we don't get those things that allow us to actually continue to do the work that we want. So that sort of arrogance is lethal. And it's something that we've got to be able to stop and get over. But balance. It's something that we need to look at about how do we achieve this balance. And if you don't have balance on your team, this may be someplace where you need to have a little bit of vulnerability, you may need to go to those and say, Look, how do we come together to solve this? Because just like any balance in any relationship, it's not about who's right. This is not about which team is right. Because I think that's the other thing that I will see is that a lot of these teams, it's about who's right And leads to my next point, which is that there's not a clear source of truth to their work. Which one of those teams is right is not a source of truth, source of truth or things like consumers or data, your opinion is not a source of truth, it can be a source of inspiration, not a source of truth. Because again, a lot of people will say, Oh, I'm the customer, I'm empathetic, I will say this, too. I'm blue in the face. At the moment, whenever you start to work on the product, you lose complete, the complete ability to be empathetic, to be completely detached, and be objective about your opinion. You need data, you need feedback, this needs to be a part of your work, and you need to do it throughout the entire process. I'm not going to dictate how it is you do that? Could it be you talk consumers all the time? Sure. Could it be you do research all the time? Sure. Can you use data as a starting point as a source of truth to be able to do that in your work? Sure. But the thing is that you need a clear and repeatable source of truth that is not one opinion of one team versus another that will crush innovation every single time because the other part in all this that we don't Want to really talk about too much great ideas are fragile, they doesn't take a whole lot to be able to get them to go away. So again, what we need to do is we need to actually go in and to have these sources of truth that'll let them live and let them give them a fighting chance. But a lot of that also is then again, we need to look at what's wrong with so many of these processes, we need to rethink metrics, we need to rethink KPIs, new ventures, new ideas, new initiatives. So many times I see them struggle, because they're judged by the same metrics and use the same of AI incorrect evaluation criteria and activities that the business has used for decades. If you want to do something different if you want to think differently. Again, yesterday's thinking is not going to solve tomorrow's problem. So again, we need to actually go back and have this be a part of the conversation because so often, if this new, innovative work, if this new way of working is gonna be brought back and be able to judge in the same way, it's not gonna work. And so again, this is why there has to be a way to evolve not only the work, of all the company of all the players Have all the thinking. So again, you can pass that back, we can try out these new KPIs. Try out these new metrics to work on new ways of working. Because so much of this is going to come down to our ability to look beyond the project in front of us. So much innovation gets crushed, because teams will just simply say, we were told to go from A to B, and we get to B, we're gonna stop. They don't look beyond it. They think they innovate. They design, they work just as far as the next project in front of them. And that that's a huge issue, you need to pick your head up, you need to have a slightly longer view. I've talked about this in other episodes about Northstar thinking, the ability to say, look, where do we want to be in two years, one year, six months, one month, what are we doing today? So there's an alignment so that there's a vision so that there's a way that we know what we're going to work towards. And also because in most companies hate to break it to you, you're not gonna be able to boil the ocean, you can't launch some big new innovative product, some big new innovative experience, all at once. The Big Bang thing doesn't work, most of the time. So we need to be more thoughtful about this and look beyond the product in front of us. So that as we go through quarter after quarter as we go through roadmap after roadmap and things like that we're aligned and moving towards something. Without that then innovation design product, all this turns into this sort of happenstance collection of different things that are just sort of muddled together. But I think that's what I see great teams do is they're able to look down the road, to be able to see what's coming just to understand what they're working towards. And a lot of this, I mean, I think also goes back to whenever we look at where we're at as an industry, we went through an era of just wild creativity where we could design anything that we wanted to, because we could we then overcorrected with the influx of data and metrics and KPIs who would put discipline and business results around that, but I think we overcorrected. Too many companies have gone data blind. Again, go back and listen to the entire episode about how do you work with data and creativity that was done for a reason. But a lot of great teams. What they also do is they're able to balance data and research with Creativity, the two need each other. If you think like, I just want to design whatever is I need to design you're wrong. If you think the data alone is going to give us the answers and tell us what we need to do, you're wrong, you need both. You need the ability to be grounded in facts and figures in certainty. But again, we need to be able to look. And if we want to create differentiation and real innovation, then we need to be able to balance those sorts of things and be able to interpolate that into doing something different. And I think that a lot of cases, what we're talking about here is that difference between learning and failure, because teams that I work with, who really understand what they do, they know how to keep learning from turning into failure. The two really are the exact same, right? Like failing should be like, it's only a failure if you don't learn from it. Okay, there's that word learning. Because I think in a lot of cases, if you say, look, we're going to do controlled experiments. We're going to do this in small ways. We're going to do this in thoughtful ways. We're going to do things so that we can learn we can go through and test out the boundary of an idea. We want to see what people actually want, then we're Gonna start to look at how does that idea and that concept come to life and we want to start to look at how do we develop it so that it's something that actually starts to take shape and form. And then we can ultimately, lastly, test the design. That's all learning failing is, hey, we're gonna go through that whole process, and we're not showing it to everybody till the end. And then it's either gonna go really well or really badly with not much in the middle. That's when failure happens. But I think these good teams, they know they understand that it's more about learning than failure, and that the difference is very much how you work with the rest of the organization is very much how you position it, it's very much coming down to here, again, the processes that we use to make sure that it is a learning and iterative cycle and that it is expected that this is going to happen. And I think a lot of that goes back to this build to think mentality, not build to launch, build a launch. We're going to do all this we're in a test at the end, builds a think means as we go through, we're going to continue to prototype where you came from and put it in front of consumers. We're going to continue to refine we're going to continue to do that sort of thing as opposed to creating these big monolithic documents and big monolithic ways of working. And what we want to do is to make it smaller, make it more of experimentation, make it something, we're gonna be able to learn from that like, again, the work that we did at Starwood with Apple watch when mobile check in. That was that was what we changed. Instead of watching these big projects to 1000 hotels, we launched that one to two, then we went to 10, then we went to 50, then we went to scale, because that allowed us to be able to build the thing to be able to look at all those different ways and all those things we weren't thinking about, and saying, hey, look, that stuff matters. A lot of this really comes down to a clear process for how this work is going to also then be integrated into the roadmap, how is it going to come back? How are we going to go out and say we want to learn that skill out great, do the experimentation, learn that find the insight, find the execution, whatever that is, and then have a way of integrating that back into the main body of work so that everything gets better? Because here again, if innovation exists, just in a vacuum, it's gonna fail. It just again, is just all practice without people without adoption, it's gonna fail. So Again, I think that's the most important part of this for me is to be able to do all this stuff. But to be clear about what is the positioning between innovation and the main line of work? How did the two influence each other? And what is the plan to be able to learn? Because if not, welcome back to the PR stunt, we'll come back to just that one off thing that you're going to find, like interesting, gee, isn't that great, I can put in my portfolio, and it's never gonna launch and it's not gonna make any difference in the business. And, again, everybody's gonna go like, Oh, that's great. But yeah, didn't really do anything. Now from there, we want to move on to people. And, you know, people, it's the best possibility, most frustrating part of what this can be. But this is really looking at what are the behaviors? What are the norms that you want to establish? Because I think that there are certain ways of behaving certain ways of thinking that I see really successful teams adopting and some of these I think we all want to aspire to very few IC teams actually execute on like, you know, one of the first ones for me is that these teams will embrace learning but There is no tolerance for failure or for incompetence. That it is something where as you look at your own team, as you look at the ability for what is it they're going to do, there is a certain level of almost brutality. And that's a word I'm going to use in a few different places as we talk about people. But I think it really is saying, look, we are all here to learn, we are all here to get better. But again, if we don't learn from it, if we do things like that, if it is a failure, if we do something stupid, that's not okay. And now this comes down to leadership. And it comes down to everybody on the team to make sure that this is understood. Because if I've said this in the past, and I think this is where it really applies. The first time it's a mistake, the second time it's a choice. The first time learn from it the first time, you didn't know any better the first time. Yeah, you can say look, I didn't know and now I know not to do that again, the second time. The second time is a failure. The second time is incompetence. The second time you need to answer for that because you didn't know better, because you didn't know that that isn't what you're supposed to do, and you did it anyway. So but the ability to actually confront that really becomes something that I think becomes really important. But there's a certain level of holding each other accountable for these things. It doesn't mean that you always have the answer. It doesn't mean that you're going through and you're always saying like, you know, it's not about being an asshole, right? Because I think too many leaders take it that way, right? Like what I need to do, I need to be in charge and you have a job because I say so. Nobody wants to work for that asshole, nobody. What you want to do is you want to be able to work with other people who hold each other accountable. You want to work with other people where this stuff matters. And I think a lot of that comes down to again, the behaviors you set because again, the thing I see with some of the best teams, they are respectful, and they are confident, but they are brutally candid. We've talked in past episodes about why use the word candidate and not honest I think honest, is more of a moral judgment candidate is more about the ability to be transparent and to be truthful. Because that's the thing you will not do your best work. If you cannot be honest about what you think you will not do your best work you will not create real partnerships that generate trust because that is going to be the byproduct of you can have all the practice In all the process in the world, if you do not have a culture that generates trust, it does not matter. This is why most teams do not have balance, because they don't trust each other. They don't trust the people are actually going to do what they say it is a huge problem. And that's the problem. You can't process you cannot legislate trust, it is something that has to be built. And so out of this, you need to be respectful. You need to be on like, you need to be confident, but you've got to be honest with each other, don't do this thing where there's a problem and you go back and chew on it and bitch about it to your team. And don't actually sit down and say, Look, this is a problem, we need to face it. That, again, if you do that, it's on all of you. It's on you just as much as anybody else. Because you have to be the one that do those things differently. But I think a lot of cases what this also will come down to is a flat but strong way of leading. And I think for two companies, what they do is instead of being able to To empower people instead of saying, hey, look, because what I mean by this by flat is that everybody needs to be a leader in some way, everybody needs to understand that this isn't about flat by like an org chart. I mean, culturally flat, people need to be able to come in. And they need to be given the latitude to take action to make decisions, to voice their opinions, because in far too many companies, you don't get that. And so what happens is, you don't have the ability to make decisions, you don't have the ability to be empowered. So what do you do, you shift the org chart. And by shaping the org chart, what I mean is that their executives to make decisions and whatever those executive decisions are, what gets executed. And it's this incredibly siloed thing where if you go in and here's a little tip, you don't know if your organization screwed up, go in and look at your website navigation. If your website navigation matches your org chart, you're siloed in your teams probably screwed up. It's one of the little tricks that I use and most of the time 90 plus percent of the time it is dead on right. But that's the thing is that people need to be given the latitude to be able to take actions make decisions voice their opinions. This does not mean a lack of leadership, it doesn't mean a lack of lack of discipline, it means you have to give people the ability to think for themselves. If you hired smart people, if you think that they actually know what it is that they're doing, if you felt like you've hired good people, here's a shock. And that word again, trust them. So I think that this is the thing is that for me a sign of great leadership, a sign of a great company, is one that again, is culturally flat, so that these teams are empowered to make decisions. Again, it doesn't mean that there is an accountability because what you are going to need is you need group collaboration with individual accountability. This is how you keep a flat, a flat cultural org working. Because, yes, go off, make decisions, try things use your best judgment, but there has to be accountability to that. If it didn't work, great. What did we learn? What are we going to do different? How are we going to fix it? If it did work? Great. How do we share that with the rest of the organization? There has to be accountability to this. And so again, this is that blur between practices and people But you've got to have that game that group collaboration with individual accountability. And I think a lot of this also then is understanding whenever it comes to innovation, you are never going to accomplish anything original if you are not willing to fail. Now, again, failure, we mean learning. And by doing this, the thing that you need to understand is that this is going to make some people insecure. This is gonna make some people uncertain of how do they do things. This is gonna make some people uncertain of if, what should they really be doing me? What am I doing is right, what is the right answer? Am I really going about this the right way, they start to doubt themselves. This is that imposter syndrome. If this is something that is going to be a part of your team, you need to understand it. Go back, listen to Episode 69. This talks about design imposter syndrome for a very deliberate reason. Because again, if I'm going to do something new, more than likely, I don't have a playbook. I don't have a reference point. I'm trying to do something that we haven't done before, which means I don't know if this is working, which means my confidence and creative confidence might be able to start getting a little shaky. Sometimes understand how to deal with it, grow it coach it. I think the other part of this, understand that each team member has their own superpower. In here again, it is looking at people as people as talent, people that you trust, not as resources, not as just names on a list or positions, the teams that again, are like we're all about innovation, but then refer to everybody's a title doesn't work. So again, what you want to do there great exercise you can do this is why partners has something called is called a superpowers deck. Fantastic way, you can do it for yourself, for your team, for their members of your team. They're great instructions on how to do that. So you understand like, what is your individual superpower? There's a fantastic book called The 10 phases of innovation from IDEO. This looks at what are usually the 10 different roles that you need. If you actually want to be able to drive creativity throughout an organization. It's a good blueprint for where to start. But that's a lot of these sort of things is that yes, there are these behaviors, but the biggest ones that I think you're in need to fight in your organization that I See companies do this well, are the two things that I see in companies who don't do it well, and one is that the teams do it well are able to suspend judgment. As we talked about ideas being frail, it's so easy to be able to say why something isn't gonna work, why tech won't be able to build it, why something's not gonna be able to happen, anything like that? Well, that's a huge problem. So you need to be able to suspend judgment. And the other part of it is that teams do this really well actively listen to each other. That may sound so simple and so obvious. But what I see in most brainstorms in most ways that so many teams work, they don't actually listen to what the other person is saying. What they listen for is the silence. Because the silence is that moment where they can interject what they want to say. It's the moment where they can interject what their idea is. They don't build on the ideas of other people. And again, this is why God did an episode on the seven rules of brainstorming. This is why we need things like this. The ability to actively listen is incredibly important so that you can actually understand and build respect for your product team, your tech team Your business partners, other members of your design team, because if all you're doing is just listening for them is just listening for them to agree with you. If all you're doing is listening for the silence, you can tell them why they're wrong. listening for the silence, you can tell them what the actual right idea should be. Yeah, all those reasons or reasons why you're failing. It's reasons why you're struggling or why you're frustrated, because that's not actually the way that you work with people. You're probably sitting there and you're thinking yourself, you know what, Steve? Great, can empathize with a lot of this stuff. Great. see a lot of stuff in my organization. Great. There's a lot of the stuff that's going on what the hell can I actually do to change any of this what, what actually is going to be different? Where do I start? Because these are not small problems. These are big, organization wide cultural problems that run much deeper than just the work. And this is why in so many cases, I will say in so many cases, I'll argue that our charge our accountability, our responsibility is to bring organizational change because we need to go in and deal with these issues. We need to To show people that there's a better way. And we are usually the best equipped by being creative people, no matter what the output is, whether you're working in product tech design, I don't, I don't care what it is you do. If you are creative, if you are of that mindset, you have the mental flexibility to be able to help with this stuff, you'd be able to help show them the way to be able to show them that change is possible. But where do you start? Where do you actually go through and say, Okay, look, what do I do? And so a lot of times, whenever I go on, and I work with these teams, there's really two or three places I would tell you to start looking at. Because again, what we want to be able to do is and in many cases, I think that the process, the process piece of it, most companies are able to handle the process piece most of the time, you have decent of expertise, the place where I think that they struggle is on the people side. And here again, if you want to change thinking not just behavior, we need to then actually be able to go in and say what is the mentality we want out of it. What are these critical behaviors that's going to allow everyone to make this change? Because the problem is most of the time, what you'll see is whenever we try to bring about cultural change, whenever we try to do innovation, there will be these like decrees. It's like a new set of values that will be rolled out. And like bonus points, if, whenever you take the first letter of all these new values, they form an acronym that has something to do with the company or like, right, like something like that, right? Like we've all seen these sorts of things. And whenever you, you see them you honestly like kind of roll your eyes and your soul dies a little and you kind of are like, Oh, God, great. Now I gotta figure out how to get, you know, fake like, I'm enthused about this. But But the challenge really is going to be how do we instead of doing something like that, how do we create behaviors? How do we create things that we really want people to embody? And what I'll do with a lot of companies as I'll have them, start by creating four or five behaviors, and these should be the way you want people Think in any part of the company, whether it's about being more iterative, to be able to think more often, whether it's about bringing diverse opinions to the table, whether it's about putting consumers at the center of it, whether it's about being that respectful and confident, but brutally candid, right? Like, these are behaviors, these are things these are not project specific. These are not process. These are things that deal with people and deal with mentality. And that's what it is that we want to create. Because what this does is it says a few key things. One is it creates a shared understanding of what is good, what is the way that we want to think here not how do we behave? Not what process do we use? How do we actually want to think, but the interesting byproduct of this also creates is it creates a way to create accountability and conversation. Because most of the time, what I what I'll see is that a lot of times, they want a new direction, they want new innovation, they want new thinking and leadership gets really fired up about this. They create all these sort of initiatives and give these big talks and you know who That executive is really fired up about it. It never makes it past their direct reports, their direct reports continue to just sort of act the same way, and be able to say the same thing and nothing really changes. What these behaviors allow people to do then is it allows for anybody at any level to hold anyone else accountable to these behaviors. Because that's the problem is that most of the time, I'm afraid to speak up and say to an executive, hey, that's not what we said we were going to do. I'm afraid to be able to speak up to a co worker and say, hey, look, that's not the right way that we should be thinking about this or going about this. That's the old way of doing things. Because one, it usually either makes a confrontational or to like, by being confrontational somehow I'm an asshole. I'm ostracized. I burn political capital, right? Like it's not well received. But whenever we say look, there is this shared and agreed upon way of these four or five behaviors, four or five different ways of thinking. Those can lay the foundation for innovation, because too many people in this case, and I think this is why I'm ending with people innovation About the people, it's about the process, the product, the work is then a byproduct, it's a result. You can't start with the work and then try to work backwards. If you say, oh, we're gonna be really innovative, and then again, that's what leads to this press release innovation. Because Yeah, we went out, we did this interesting work, we did something that looked really pretty, didn't really go anywhere didn't really change the company, because that's the thing, we just wanted to concentrate on the work that you need to go through and you need to look at the people piece, you need to look at the cultural piece, you look at the thinking piece, so that again, this doesn't become this one off accident, it doesn't become this one off thing, it can become a sustainable part of what it is you do. And a lot of this is also then creating the space create the time to think about and discuss that road ahead. We talked about that teams usually run from project to project from fire to fire with these day to day small problems, even the big things unsolved, create specific meetings where you can actually discuss where you want to go with the work, create these meetings, where there are opportunities and then you can assign people to start exploring what comes out of there, because that's the thing most people most teams don't Anytime to actually be able to think or discuss what it is they want to do, and then it's all some sort of big mystery about why are we just this slave to a roadmap, think about it, be deliberate. But I think a lot of it also is to sit down and think about inside of your company, because this is why they're going to write books on innovation, creativity, leadership, all this other stuff until the cows come home. Every company is different, every team is different, every person is different. There's not a magic bullet to any of this. But what you need to do is you need to sit down and actually think about what are the cultural barriers and biases that you have in your company? What are the pink elephants that are sitting in plain sight? What are those places where you know what you refer to people by titles, not by name? What are the places where again, everyone just simply waits for the executive speak and then aligns behind what their thinking is? What are the places where again, what we want to do is that we're so quick to judge that we crush any good ideas before they actually come out the door. Look at what those are, take time, don't just do an hour like take days, weeks, whatever it is, but to think about what are those barriers and biases that exist in your organization? Because those are the things that are stopping crazy tivity those are the things that are gonna stop innovation. More than anything else, you can do all the work in the world. But those biases and barriers are the things that are going to keep it from going out the door. Because that's the thing that it's with this that I think a lot of people don't want the answer to be. They don't want it to be that great teams, a great innovation is born out of trust. They don't want it to be that it's born out of a shift in thinking not just in behavior. Because these are hard to quantify. They're hard to be able to work on, they're hard to be able to do at scale. But that's what really makes a difference. And I think the companies that you look at the ones that you feel like do produce the best product, I will almost guarantee you that if you look under the hood, those are the things that they do well, those are the things even if it's just in one area of a company, but they're able to do that. They're able to build trust or to build communication or to build balance or to build a lot of these concepts. And then the work as a result of that. You don't just say hey, look, we're new, innovative work, and then everything else somehow we'll find a way of changing. It's not even it just doesn't work. So but that's the thing. Think about those concept because I think that's where real innovation, that's where innovation with a capital I gets done and actually gets launched. Because if you're able to do that, but it's gonna be up to you sit down, look at that stuff, think about it and understand, well how does this actually go on? And what are those barriers that you need to start with, then the work will come, the innovation will come behind that. Hopefully, this has been useful. Hopefully you've gotten some insight of this. I know it's gonna be a big hill to get up and it'll be a big thing to climb through. But trust me, you can do this, but start in these smaller ways these more sustainable ways we can start to drive change. If you think this show has been any bit helpful, please take a minute go to your favorite podcast platform. leave a review while you're there, make sure you subscribe so you get the latest episodes whenever those come out. As always, you can find all of the show notes to be able to do this related articles a list of books that I talked about all this other stuff, head over to the crazy one that's crazy and the number one calm you can look at all the different episodes there. Look, follow me on any social media channel like the show on Facebook, you get updates Ask questions. I'm always available to anybody who wants to be able to do that and be out there. As always, everybody in legal wants me to remind you that the views here are just my own. They don't represent any of my current or my former employers. These are just my own thoughts. Hopefully, the Hutu pugs snoring under my desk haven't been too bad. I know people have mentioned that you can hear them, they seem to be in really rare form today. I guess they're worn out from the holidays or something. So they're sawing logs down there. But finally, I say it every time because I mean it every time. But thank you for your time. I know that time is truly the only real luxury that any of us have, was incredibly humbled to you and to spend any of it with me. So until next time, go out there start to work on real innovation that actually ships that can actually make things different And all the while while you do it. Remember, stay crazy.