Invisible Solutions

For many years, Stephen Shapiro. he’s presented his provocative strategies on innovation, culture and collaboration to audiences in 50 countries. During his fifteen-year tenure with the consulting firm, Accenture, he created and led a 20,000-person innovation practice. He’s the author of five books, including Invisible Solutions. His clients include Marriott, 3M, P&G, Microsoft, Nike, NASA and GE. In 2015, Stephen was inducted into the Speaker Hall of Fame. He’s also been a regular judge and mentor on the TV show, Girl Starter. We’re going to be talking about stories, how to become more inventive and what the heck is an invisible solution. Stephen, welcome to the show.

John, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

I love to ask people like you to take us back to childhood or school when you started this curiosity factor that you seem to have in spades about, how does the world work and how can things be better? Start anywhere with whatever the story jumps out in your head.

I would say I’ve always been a bit of a tinkerer. I liked seeing how things work so I would take things apart and hopefully, try to put them back together. I did that sometimes successfully and sometimes not so successfully but that was something I always love to do as a kid. I also love magic because to me, magic is like, how do things happen? How do you do things that are impossible? I’ve always been fascinated with taking things that appear complex and trying to deconstruct them and understand them, then reconstruct them in a way that they’re not so complex.

Take us at the beginning of your college. How did you decide what to major in when you have that interest?

I had two paths that I was going to go down. One was going to music because I was a jazz sax player and good at it, and then the other one was an engineer. I got a lot of advice. In fact, one piece of advice I got from someone which goes counter to what a lot of people might say is they said, “If your passion is music, don’t major in it because once you start having to make a living off of it, it might crush your passion. Choose something that is going to make money and then do music as your true passion on the side.” I became an engineer because I’m a bit of a nerd.

There’s a lot of similarities between music and math and all that, so that’s not a huge shock. I’ve heard Elizabeth Gilbert talk about creativity and in her case, it’s writing books like you. She’s like, “If you put too much pressure on your creative outlets to make you a living, it does take the joy away from it.” There’s something to be said there, where we don’t have any pressure on anything we love doing, and then if the money happens to come great. To make that jump in is I advise that a lot of young people are not getting because Robert’s “follow your bliss” situation is a big thing. Let’s jump into those fifteen years at Accenture. You’re based in London some of the time and you’re managing all these people. What kinds of problems were you solving?

The biggest problems that we were focused on were how do we take the mindset of 20,000 people who are much technology-led? A lot of Accenture was much on technology implementation. The group that I was working with was about, whether it’s SAP or some other enterprise management system or some other new technology, how do we get them to focus on value first? How do we get them to think innovatively and then look at the technology as solution? That was the problem we were trying to solve. We did that through a series of programs, books, materials and other things trying to create a greater awareness of how you can, without taking a lot of time, rethink the entire thought process for delivering a project.

You started your speaking career after that. Is that correct?

I had the first copies of my book on September 10th, 2001. It’s a bittersweet day because the next day, things were a little different. I plan to leave the company at that point and left Accenture when my first book came out. It’s been many years that I’ve been doing my own thing. I’ve been focusing on helping companies innovate, solve problems, collaborate and things of that nature.

In your book, Invisible Solutions, you’re wearing a purple shirt and the burqa is purple. There’s a lot of purple on your website as well. Let’s talk about the importance of branding, being known for colors, and certain things. What are your thoughts on that? How did you come up with purple?

I always loved purple. I have these big geodes that are deep purple and I always love those. Even as a kid, I have those. I’ve always loved purple for whatever reason. I hired branding companies that said, “You can’t do purple. Purple’s a bad color for a brand.” I moved away from purple. When the book came out, we decided to go with the purple cover. I went back to what I love. I love purple. To me, it’s a good royal color. I remember one of the first speeches that I gave after I left Accenture, I was in Singapore. I was told that purple is a color for innovation. I was like, “There you go. That worked out perfectly.”

That’s all meant to be. The cover of your book is fascinating. There’s a guy in a suit and these glow in the dark glasses. What’s the story there?

It’s the variation of the invisible man. The whole book is on 25 lenses, which are 25 different ways to reframe the problem. The fedora, glasses, tie, and jacket, if you look carefully, you’ll see subtly are all 25 lenses written. The whole outfit is made up of the words of the lenses.

It reminds me of Dolce & Gabbana, how they have words and their logos on dresses, purses and things and it becomes immersive like that. My first question is, how’d you come up with the title? Usually, people think, “If a solution is invisible, is that a solution?” We get down in the Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole a little bit.

I’ve been fortunate to have a buddy of mine, Adam Lefort, who’s brilliant at technology but he’s also great at coming up with big concepts. One of my books was called Best Practices are Stupid. Adam came up with that title. He came up with Invisible Solutions. The whole idea of the book is the best solutions are right in front of your nose. You just can’t see them because we’re not asking the right questions or we’re looking at the problem the wrong way. He said, “The solutions are there. They’re just invisible. They’re hidden.” That’s how we came up with the title which led to the invisible man, and then the cover was designed by my buddy, John Brunswick, who was at Salesforce. He came up with this concept one day and said, “How about the invisible man as a concept for the book cover?” I’m like, “Cool. Let’s go with it.”

Both in your keynote and in your book, you talk about how we are hardwired to ask ineffective questions. People would say, “We’re hardwired that way?” Let’s start with your definition of what is an ineffective question. I can guess but I’m sure you put a lot of thought into what an ineffective question is.

An ineffective question is one that doesn’t give you the results you want. The reason why we ask ineffective questions is because we probably don’t even ask questions. What we’re doing is we tend to make snap judgments or snap decisions, and then we start moving forward quickly. Part of this is because the brain’s primary function is survival. We need to innovate to survive and we need to adapt to survive, but we tend to innovate and adapt as a means of survival. The primary message of the brain says, “Whatever we did before we were together today, John, didn’t kill us so it’s probably safest for us to continue whatever we’ve done in the past.”

Anything new, different, and ambiguous might be risky, and therefore, we don’t want to do it. The brain doesn’t spend a lot of time processing the question. It is more reactionary in many respects. We need to put that conscious mechanism of putting the pause button on and say, “What is the real problem that I’m trying to solve? Where am I trying to go?” Sometimes, in organizations, business, and life, we’re under time pressures, so we think we need to go fast. The problem is if you go fast in the wrong direction, you’re just going further away from the ultimate result that you want to achieve. A little bit of time upfront can go a long way in repositioning you need to go in the right direction.

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