Innovation Training in the Wild

A popular Center for Creative Leadership study from the late 90’s shows that learning roughly lays out as 70% on the job, 20% from coaches, mentors and peers, and 10% from formal training. Details (including contrary views) here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/70/20/10_Model. Many other experiences and studies point to similar conclusions. Studies on content retention show that actually doing something oneself is magnitudes more effective than reading about it or listening to a talk.

How can we take advantage of this insight?

Use games and simulations.

One powerful way to embrace learning by doing is to craft games and simulations to deliver learning. This is how team building activities work. A three-legged race or a trust fall is intended to simulate what it is like to trust a teammate and work together to achieve a goal.

One extraordinary useful note to make on simulations and games it that the learning is in the debrief. The lesson the trust fall teaches has far more impact if it is made explicit in a debrief discussion, than if left in its implicit form (a visceral but non-verbalized lesson).

Innovation simulations often involve some puzzle or challenge, and invite participants to craft interesting solutions and pitch them to one another or their senior leaders. As an exercise, this can be useful, but we invite you to go much further...

Make it real.

Offer up seed funding, or a lunch date with a senior executive or a stock option or other enticing reward. These are not mere prizes. Successfully innovating often leads to funding, interest from big players, and equity stakes. These are the real rewards of innovation, position them as such. Or, better yet, seek to discover how innovation is currently rewarded at your organization and adopt or mimic those rewards.

Include the challenges that come along with innovation. When you try to do something new and valuable there is real risk. Your credibility might be on the line, your job even. Mimic these risks. In a video game, if you fall off a cliff you die,... but, you have many lives. Give many lives, but make the risks and challenges as real as you can.

Emphasize the right aspects. If coming up with new ideas is the difficult part at your firm, then focus on idea generation (hint: having good ideas is almost never the problem). If building a business case that ties into the corporate strategy is the difficult part, then host a pitch competition, but make it real. The people listening should not be pretending to listen to a pitch, they should ideally be listening to a real pitch, and be ready to accept and help operationalize the idea that’s being shared.

Tie training into innovation processes.

Most organizations today have some formal aspect to their innovation activities. Maybe the mission statement has the word ‘innovation’ in it, or the CEO gave a rousing speech about innovation last quarter. Maybe there’s a company-wide idea management system or an innovation lab in the marketing department (or another department). Maybe R&D has a visitors program, or there is a newly staffed Chief Innovation Officer. Tie these things into the training program. Have the Chief Innovation Officer keynote the training program. Post the mission statement on the wall with ‘innovation’ underlined. Seek to make these connections that the training will be that much more connected to the rest of the organization and participants daily work lives.

Reward with learning.

The most powerful listening I have ever experienced in a training program was when we ran it like a race. Participants generated ideas and formed teams around them, then they developed those ideas and raced toward building fully-fledged business cases, but only progressing through a given stage if a panel of senior leaders deemed them ready. If a group was held back, they instantly snatched up the optional training available to them and entrenched themselves in learning.

Learning naturally follows making mistakes. Embraces that when designing training.

Don’t be afraid of naming winners and losers.

There are an infinite amount of new ideas that might improve an organization and its bottom line (or bottom lines), but no organization has the resources to pursue all possibilities at once. Choices must be made on what to pursue and what to not pursue. Ideally, senior leaders would have all the information up front, and could make perfect decisions, leading to zero-waste massive growth. Sadly, reality is a far cry.

The effective strategy looks more like a tournament, where many ideas are given a tiny amount of resources, and a subset are chosen to move forward. The process repeats, pairing down the number of ideas, but increasing the amount of resources they get. By the end, there are a few ideas, or even just one, that is likely to be paramount to an organization’s future growth.

On the training side, the lesson is the same. Not everyone at the firm will pioneer a company-altering innovation, but some can. The idea is to consider everyone at first, then to filter people out along the way. Of course, an innovation tournament can be held every year, and participants can be encouraged to work on their skills in the off season, and try for a come back the following year. And what a great way to begin building a culture of innovation.

Please write to us if you have ideas or questions you’d like us to respond to directly ([email protected]), and best of luck innovating!

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