Innov8rs 2020 - Eat, Sleep, Innovate

Being a Curator of the Innov8rs conference gave me the privilege to attend a virtual unconference session with Scott Anthony. Scott’s a senior partner at Innosight and an amazing thought leader in Innovation. 

Here I want to share some great insights from the session and an awesome live sketch done by Leina, a very talented Conversational Sketch artist.

Scott talked about his upcoming book Eat, Sleep, Innovate: How to Make Creativity an Everyday Habit Inside Your Organisation.

Scott highlighted why organisations are not getting the results they want from innovation. He put a big part of this down to day-day rituals in the organisations. These rituals stifle innovation. 

There are many amazing practitioners who have done a lot of work to give us tools to help shape a strategy, to structure and to build out a plan.

However, this is still a persistent problem.

Look at your kids - you don't need to train them to be curious and experiment, they just do! Yet when you move kids into groups and then one day into organisations something happens to them. They lose that curiosity and experimentation.

We define innovation as something new that creates value. To do that we need to do something different. Organisations at any scale are not built to do that. They are built to do, what they do exactly the same, day in and day out. It’s about reliable-systems-structures to give you the same outcome time and time again. Scott made the point “Children have it and people in the organisations still have it too!”

These systems, structures and rituals too often hold us back. They are part of an  "Institutionalised Intertia" which is an addiction to business as usual. 

DBS Bank was discussed as an example. Once upon a time they had one of the lowest customer satisfaction ratings in the industry and were not considered Innovative by any stretch. 

Looking at them now they are heralded as one of the most innovative banks. If this organisation, which has to be a heavily process-based entity and is in a heavily regulated industry, can turn around then surely you can do it anywhere.

Over 10 years they transformed from slow-moving entity which was very biased by regulation to investing in new tech, taking control, and creating an environment that inspires collaboration. 

There’s a secret thing they did, they attacked this inertia, attacked the day-day behaviours and changed habits. 

They decided they wanted to operate as a 28,000 person startup. They zoomed into what is stopping them. Alongside other things they zoomed in on meetings. If they wanted to change they needed to foster collaboration making their meetings outcome focussed, agile, embrace diversity and most of all be productive. From their own research 60% of meetings were deemed to be non productive. People turned up late, no agenda, people with loud voices dominated conversations, etc. 

So they created a hack MOJO (MO a meeting owner and JO joint group observer). They focussed on the fact, that people need to be present and that everyone needs to contribute. The results from this one change has seen a realisation from the organisation that their meetings are now 90% productive and are focussed on driving outcomes. 

The learning here is that it’s all about building mechanisms to drive tiny habits. Do this and you can have exponential results

The question this raises is how do you know what to focus on?

This Scott says starts with asking what is the culture that you are trying to create. You can then look at the culture that exists and what are the habits needed everyday that will help to achieve this. Broken down:

1. know the culture you want to create
2. delineate the behaviours that help deliver this
3. ask yourself what are we doing instead of following that behaviour

It's not easy but you need to spend time finding and identifying the behaviours. Once you have this, it’s straight out of the behavioural psychology book, look at the BEANS(behaviour-enabler-artefacts-nudges), System 1-fast thinking and System 2-deep thinking. So using System 1 identify the invisible which is the behaviour and System is 2 implementing the ritual, the checklist, the coach to tell people how they are going.

So for MOJO it wasn’t just the meeting owners and joint team observers, it was also about the artefacts, the cubes, screen savers, backgrounds, etc.

Scott said in reality there are more than 101 BEANS, if not more and to attack these innovation blockers you need to get aware of these beings and create your organisational checklist that’s right for your organisation.

The insight and opportunity I see from Scott’s session is: 

Spend time looking into your organisational BEANS and creating your organisational “Tiny Habits” plan. Everyone in an organisation helps shape innovation and transformation.

Thanks again to Scott and Innov8rs for an amazing session where I learnt a lot. There was a lot more that was discussed in the session but that’s for another post. 

#DatacomFoundry & #TheKerryToppCollective are rapt to be invited, as Aotearoa curators’, to be part of Innov8rs. It's on till the 17th of September with great speakers to come and all the sessions are available on demand. Join us at https://lnkd.in/gGrHFKp

We can’t predict the future but here’s to working together to shape it!