Customer Proximity

Customer Proximity

What is it and how do you get it?

?What if! have twenty years experience designing and managing customer proximity programmes within organisations including Unilever, Pfizer and Barclays Bank.   So what have we learnt?  Here we summarise why organising for customer proximity can deliver surprising benefits, why corporations often struggle to make headway on what shouldn’t be a difficult task and we share the practical secrets of those winning at customer proximity today.

What is customer proximity?

All organisations have customer intelligence in some form.  Customer proximity goes beyond quantitative and qualitative research and describes an organisational muscle; the capability of many colleagues, at all levels, to have an instinctive understanding of what is the right thing to do for their customers.  It’s an ambitious concept, especially for large organisations.

Customers?  Who are these customers?

Most organisations are a link in a chain of value, sometimes separated from the final purchaser by intermediaries or retailers.  Often the end purchaser is not the consumer.  Getting a common definition of the customer is an important if obvious first step.  For instance a pharmaceutical company selling cancer drugs may choose to see a patient’s carer as the ‘real customer’ despite an army of doctors, healthcare trusts and of course the patient themself having claim to the title of ‘customer’. 

One of the most frustrating conversations we have had around ‘who is the customer’ was with a joint meeting of an airline and the airport from which the airline operated.   We counted several ‘customers’ during the conversation including both the airport and airline who regarded each other as a customer, the regulator, travel agents who book tickets, the local community and of course passengers.  Passengers were subdivided into separate missions – passengers shopping, passengers late for a plane, VIP passengers, nervous passengers and so on.  The conversation was paralysed whilst the room disagreed on who they were really fighting for - until we jointly chose to identify the customer as a passenger who wanted to move through an airport with the minimum of fuss.

Why is customer proximity the best thing since sliced bread?

The confidence of colleagues, at all levels to do the right thing for their customers feels unarguable.  Focusing on a single customer need can lift people out of their silos and get them all facing in a similar direction.  Seeing the whites of a customers’ eyes (or smelling the prey), feeling what they feel, especially in the environment in which they make decisions can be profoundly moving and fuel the hunger to make things happen.  We once took the Board of a major UK bank to hold their meetings in a modest terraced house in East London.  The homeowner asked our Board members to take their shoes off as this was a ‘no shoes house’.  That day the Board learnt just how increasingly irrelevant banks were becoming for lending money within communities but somehow it was the location that made them really believe it – even though they had had the data in house for years.  

The digital revolution has made customer proximity much more accessible.  Today you can go on a tour of someone’s home wherever they are, you can ask a thousand people a question, or show them a new product and get a response almost immediately, you can track special interest sites or even start your own debate and in an instant you can find the ‘crazy’ people who conventional market research passes by.

So customer proximity makes things move faster and with real passion, less is spent on data collection and lets face it; backing your gut is exciting.  Isn’t that what everyone wants to do? 

So if the case for customer proximity is so convincing why doesn’t everyone do it?

There are unfortunately a number of organisational illnesses that resist customer proximity.   First off is the abundance of easy data.  Leading UK supermarkets have probably had the best customer data globally, and yet couldn’t see the rise of the discounter and small store in enough ‘colour’ to force them to act.  Sometimes organisations would be better off with less investment in customer information and more reliance on the entrepreneurial and empathetic skills that lie within all colleagues. 

A second illness is the curse of the clever segmentation exercise.  Most clever people can create a rational customer segmentation and many customer segmentation exercises end up looking like Victorian butterfly collections – rows of perfect examples and yet somehow very sterile.  Real life is a lot messier than most segmentation exercises: Often it’s the shopping mission that’s more useful than the segment (as many segments can share the same mission).  Also it’s the rejected segments that can be the most interesting because those ‘weirdos’ might just be about to burst into the mainstream.  Then there’s the curse of the careless anecdote born out of segmentation.  Somehow a particular customer stood out in research, they said something memorable and the Board have never forgotten what ‘Kath ‘said.  In fact Kath seems to hold a huge amount of power – frustrating for everyone and a dangerous way to make decisions.

Finally many executives are unconsciously incompetent around customer proximity.  Many haven’t tested themselves or their organisations around customer awareness.  Quite possibly this might not seem an important thing to do, not as important as all the pressing operational issues that any executive today faces. 

So here are two questions, if you can answer them then push delete and do something else, you don’t need to read on:

1. Do you know whether and how your organisation’s source of customer intelligence is better and more impactful than your competitors?

2. Looking around your peers, do you have confidence that you have a shared view of who is most insightful and in what areas?  Do you afford them more airplay than your peers you’d rate at the bottom of the list?

Critical customer proximity muscles

Below we outline the muscles an organisation needs to flex to get fitter and stronger at being close to customers:

An experimental approach:  Forget ‘Change Management’ – the best route to influencing colleagues is to experiment with something different, prove it works and wait for others to copy.  We’ve worked with a small incoming call team in an energy company’s call centre and helped these frontline colleagues use their down time to make outgoing calls and create their own picture of their key customers.  As customers called during the day they added balls to one of three jars that represented the customer. 

Think broad: Customer proximity is a multi-layered concept and can be killed by many things:  The messages leaders give through careless use of language, the lack of credit given to customer insight behind a commercial success, the exclusion of the Market Research team, the lack of skills training given to a team grappling with a challenge - and the list goes on.  Our conclusion is that a programme of customer proximity has to start with a thorough exploration of all the potential land mines and enablers of success ahead and a plan made to deal with each of them.

A North Star:  Many organisations are crystal clear about the type of relationship they want with their customers.  Ryan Air knows its’ customers care about price and traditionally were content to have a ‘take us or leave us’ relationship.   Amazon know their customers want efficiency above all else, so rather than cultivate a relationship they just deliver time and time again.  First Direct are clear they stand for ‘Adult to Adult Banking’.   John Lewis on the other hand is famous for it’s service levels, knowing that both their colleagues and customers value good manners and helpfulness.  But some organisations have unwittingly developed schizophrenic relationships with their customers.  Energy companies for instance; you hate them when the bill arrives and you love the guy who fixes the boiler.  Love and hate wrapped up in one relationship!  Customer proximity can reveal complexities like this within an existing customer relationship. Ultimately a decision has to be made about the type of relationship you want to have with your customers.

Out of office:  Customer proximity is a ‘doing’ sport.  You need to invest time in activities that will probably seem unproductive or even unpleasant.  A great deal of our clients privately admit to being uncomfortable with their customers, dig deeper and they admit that they fear their customers won’t like them.  And most of our clients can always think of a better use of time than to leave the office for half a day to go shopping, cooking or just talking with a customer in their home.  Also we have not been trained at work to observe or ask open questions.  The way we work today actually rewards rapid judgment.  So to ensure customer proximity gets going we need to address these issues; a challenging but safe series of out-of-the-office experiences, training in listening and observing and designing experiences that expose colleagues to a 360 view of experiences including those beyond your product field.   A critical tool is to regard all that you see, hear or read as a ‘clue’ just a single data point that you can squirrel away and build out into an insight with colleagues later on.

Leading for customer proximity:  Whilst it’s important for leaders to get out of the office and experience the reality of a customer’s life, it is also important they have a philosophy on how to lead for customer proximity.  Clearly they need to role model, they also need to ask challenging questions of their teams; “Do we really know what our product competes with?  What are customers not telling us in our research? Do we know if we have better insight than our competitors?”  Leaders also need to ensure they give permission to their people to explore.   Very often we meet employees who complain they can’t free themselves up to get close to customers, then we meet their bosses who complain their people won’t take the time to get close to customers!

Finally, customer proximity is not an end in itself.  The insight we get from getting closer needs converting to better products, services and processes.   How colleagues first share a hunch, grow and mature the idea that the hunch has created is critical.  Any programme of customer proximity needs a partial vacuum at the back end – insights need to be sucked into an idea process and then discarded or quickly developed.  Our experience is that the best insight and ideas processes are low on process and high on behaviours – how people work together is more important than following a best practice process.  The latter is easy to develop, the former takes a lot more guts and practice but ultimately is much more rewarding. 

COPYRIGHT ?WHAT IF! INNOVATION PARTNERS 2014

Eyes Wide Shut

We are publishing exclusive research today about how large businesses are leading for innovation in post-recession Britain.

For a brief synopsis of the research, and some techniques to help your business innovate, click here through to our website.  

Brian Groom, Business and Employment Editor for the Financial Times, has also written about it on page 3 of the Financial Times - Click here to view or visit my press page.

In Praise Of Imperfection

Most of us spend our working lives figuring out how to make our product or service more attractive. How do we get more bums on seats, bigger basket size or share of throat? However we describe it, our job is to make things better for customers. 

The same applies to each and every one of us at work.  We each have an agenda, a project or an idea that we need to land.  We need to figure out how to make ourselves and our work so attractive that colleagues and customers beat a path to our office / cubicle / hot-desk and demand to help out.

No one likes a smarty-pants, the smug know-it-all who always seems to be one step ahead.  In contrast we all have a soft spot for the well-intentioned colleague who is sweating over the quality of his or her project.  And this is where imperfection plays such an important role.  Finding a way to present thinking that is 90% baked (and looks it) with an exhortation to co-create the final 10% is a real skill. 

At ?What If! it has taken us many years and hundreds of project assignments to work out the difference between just-unbaked-enough (encourages co-creation) and fully baked (no need to engage).  It takes guts to share an idea in a way that says “help me get better” as opposed to an idea that says “I’m perfect, I don’t need your help”.

Here are three practical tools that will magnetise your toughest challenges:

1.  No PowerPoint – find a blank wall and tell the story of your idea with hand drawn flip charts or supersize Post-it notes.  There’s something more thoughtful and personal about sharing thinking like this rather than the usual deck.

2.  Make it physical – if you are presenting options to a group of people get them to stand up and move to the option they instinctively prefer and ask them to describe to the rest of the group why they chose that option.  This creates a natural ‘advocates’ forum.  Now the level of debate is much more passionate and personal.

3.  Signal – be explicit with your audience how you’d like them respond.  Something like “I’ve been working on this for a week, I’ve done my homework and would love your help shaping the options”.  An exhortation like this changes the atmosphere in the room, corridor or phone call.  Suddenly we all line up behind shaping the best outcome.

The paradox is that if you want to absolutely nail something, to be the one who is known for being 100% buttoned, then somewhere along the line you will need to unbutton and embrace imperfection.  

The Casting Muscle

There’s been a storm of interest in Zappos's recent announcement that it was getting rid of traditional management hierarchy.  The Washington Post has a good summary.  Click here to view.  In a nutshell the idea is to organise people around the work to be done rather than organise around job titles and pay grades.  The goal is to keep a growing business nimble deploying the best groupings of people over a limited time for a specific ‘job to be done’.

 
Innovators, especially those in large organisations, take note.  Innovators play a delicate and subtle balancing game.  On the one hand you need a thick skin, supreme self confidence and the tenacity of a barnacle but on the other you need to listen hard to others and to enjoy a level of paranoia that leads you to constantly question the status quo and your own performance.  This crazy mindset-mix is much better achieved with a small number of people working together on a project, with huge attachment to the outcome and not the process.

At ?What If! we try hard to cast the leadership of tasks and projects in pairs or small teams.  We find a well matched pair can inject more than double the audacity, support, experience and fun than a single person leading the same task.  And surprisingly, the level of responsibility and feeling of ownership is if anything enhanced rather than diluted.

Innovation needs an over-active casting muscle.  For most organisations - to be constantly asking ‘who needs to work with who to get an outstanding result’, rather than just allocating tasks to the ‘appropriate person’ is new.  So look around you now; how many of your key innovation, change or shake-it-all-up tasks are being led by a single person, and could be re-cast?

 

Doing the right thing

Yesterday a parliamentary review ‘Changing Banking For Good’ delivered a stinging verdict on the performance of UK banks and behavior of many bankers.  This was a serious exercise with the great and the good working over 6 months, interviewing hundreds of witnesses and hearing 161 hours of evidence.  Among the recommendations are more demanding remuneration regimes for bankers and more competition for retail and corporate banks.  Hooray!  That all sounds good to me – but the real turning point for our financial services institutions won’t come with regulation.  It will come when the concept of ‘customer’ is tattooed into the souls of bankers – I mean branch staff, their supervisors, head office staff and corporate lenders.

All companies have to pay some regard to their customers – I would argue that banks have found this hard.  Take retail banks where customers are on the whole disengaged from their banks, they don’t expect much and don’t consider changing to a new bank.  On the other side of the counter bank staff have to contend with a myriad of rules and regulations.  It reminds me of a project I did once for a famous pizza chain – they had 47 separate standards when cooking and serving a pizza.  The poor pizza operatives (yes that was their job title) were so afraid of the mystery shopper that they didn’t even consider the customer – their god was the 47 standards.

Only when bankers get a deep understanding of who their customers are and what turns them on will they get truly motivated to deliver the highest standards.  Not because a regulation says you must or must not do something – but because you have a connection with someone, someone you want to help out, someone you want to do the right thing for.

Technology 1: Humans 1

There was a piece in yesterday’s FT that caught my eye.  Adidas were claiming 3D printers had dramatically reduced prototyping time.  Before = 12 people to create a prototype, Now = only two.  Before = up to six weeks to evaluate a prototype, Now = just one to two days!  So, hooray for technology.  These are impressive statistics but it’s not the speed of a single round of prototyping that’s the issue – the big win is how many more iterations you can pack into the development process.  Ironically technology has made the interaction between human beings even more relevant.  It takes guts and a big dose of humility to manage an iterative development process.  Admitting you didn’t get it right first time, leaning in and listening to your colleagues’ interpretation of results – maybe more junior colleagues at that – these are the prerequisites of an experimental approach to ‘making new stuff.’ 

Want a blow-by-blow account of how to become a virtuoso experimenter?  Read Chapter Three of my book ‘The Science of Serendipity: How to Unlock the Promise Of Innovation In Large Organisations.’ 

To order a copy please click here 

Remote Working, Red Herring

The ban on home-working at Yahoo! by its CEO, Marissa Meyer last month, resulted in a twitterstorm of indignation. Hot on her heels, Best Buy has also stopped a programme which had been introduced back in 2005 allowing employees to work when and where they chose. Both companies are in need of a pick-me-up and both cite the need for human beings to collaborate and collide as drivers of prosperity.
 
But simply banning home-working is a blunt instrument that risks missing the point altogether. I've seen some terrific working practices that promote innovation, efficiency and engagement amongst co-workers - whether you work from home or not.....

See press page for link to full article or click here

The Science of Serendipity - Innovation Excellence interview continued...

Here’s the last installment of my interview with innovationexcellence.com (click here for parts one and ­two):

Lou Killeffer: Inherent in a challenge is the risk of failure. You spoke previously about risk being one of the impediments that a large organization tends to weed out of people’s daily lives. In the book, you say making ideas “real” is a practical way to help “tolerate risk.” What do you mean by making ideas real?

Matt Kingdon: How many times has someone described something to you, and you formed a picture in your mind’s eye, and when they eventually produced this great, new idea you were disappointed?

LK: Most of the time.

MK: Our brains are complex, self-organizing systems that rely on precedence. That’s how human beings work. We build up precedence throughout our lives, and innovation is the opposite of precedence. It’s about things we could not possibly conceive of. So the less we can use the spoken word to describe something we want somebody to respond to, the better. Our ability to make it real in a scrappy, low-cost way enables someone to give us a reaction to what we just produced that’s close to how a customer might react. And from that, you can learn a lot. If you’ve still got time or money left in the budget, you can make another prototype—and then another and then another. This cycle of making things real is the cornerstone of innovation. We want to stretch out beyond the concept of prototyping. When someone says, Can you make that real for me? that might mean, Can you make it real in terms of the revenue it might generate? or Can you make it real in terms of what’s the customer experience like? Can you make it real for me? is a terrific question. And if you put “now” on the end—Can you make it real now?—you give it real urgency and supercharge the innovation process. People can’t hide behind 100-page PowerPoint presentations. They have to roll their sleeves up and mimic or create or prototype something, which inevitably drives the kind of dialogue that’s of value during the innovation process.

LK: It’s as much an invitation as a question, isn’t it? And it leads to iterative thinking, the build on the idea.

MK: To ask someone to help you make something real now—everyone understands what that means. If you said to somebody, Let’s make the prototype now, it’s a far more complex procedure. We’re trying to make the innovation process as simple, as enjoyable, and as human as possible.

LK: Matt, you also write about going to the “margins of your market.” What do you mean by that? Is that the place to look for ideas or solutions?

MK: Most of our clients talk to their customers a lot. But so do their competitors and sometimes they even use the same researchers. So they’re all eating the same food, and that is not a recipe for innovation. What’s more interesting is going to the margins, the edges, the earlier adopters. Or the rejecters, the people who are angry with you. Or the people who use your products or services in entirely unexpected and eccentric ways. These people will have something out of the ordinary to tell you. And there’s real gold in what they have to say, coupled with the fact that you’re far more likely to discover something that your competitors aren’t discovering. At ?What If!, we believe in talking to customers, but that’s only half the story. You can also find real insight from the people who are producing the products, delivering the products—it’s why the whole value chain has insight, not just the consumer.

LK: You also make the point that the physical space around us has a big impact on the way we think and interact with each other. The space in your newly renovated Manhattan office is wide open, as one example. How did you reach these conclusions?

MK: We’ve opened offices all around the world over the last 20 years, and we’ve experimented with how to configure desks, walls, and sofas—you name it. We’ve experimented with food. We’ve even experimented with the location of the washrooms. What we’re trying to do is not create something that’s aesthetically pleasing—that’s not the point. What we’re trying to do is create collisions between people. We think people are more productive if they can move around an environment that enables them to meet different people and use different spaces for different purposes. So if you take the tour of ouroffice today, you’ll find that, functionally, it’s well thought through. There are many different spaces with different purposes. We set a lot of store bypeople eating together, for instance, because eating is a real mood changer. You can sit down with clients or with a colleague, stop talking about work, eat a nice meal together. Suddenly, you find yourself talking about the most important thing that you didn’t talk about in the meeting. You’ve created a sidebar conversation—and as we all know, that’s where most of the great innovative discussions happen. They happen in the shower, on the way to work, on the way into the meeting, in the elevator, in the car with a colleague on the way to work. They don’t always happen at the traditional boardroom table, when you’re facing each other with an agenda, under time pressure, with a lot of people in the room.

LK: Matt, have you always been an innovator? Did you always know this is what you wanted to do? How did you get started?

MK: Oddly enough, my degree at university was a law degree. Which amuses my colleagues because they’re right in assuming I’d be one of the world’s worst lawyers. Then I went to work for a very large multinational for eight or nine years in various marketing and sales jobs. It was there that I developed an empathy for all these hardworking people in big organizations.They’re good souls who work so hard and want to make a difference, but they sometimes feel that window is gone from their lives. I’ve always beeninterested in working with the real heroes of innovation, the people who can make innovation happen in large corporations. It’s a far harder task than being an entrepreneur where you have nothing to lose. Innovating when you’ve got everything to lose is a noble pursuit. And I think the market we’re in is a young market. It must be how David Ogilvy felt on Madison Avenue in the 1960s. This feels like a pioneering time for innovation. The rules aren’t really written. Despite that tsunami of books you referred to at the top of our conversation, there are few real authorities. And being able to helphardworking people become heroes of innovation feels like a good thing to do with one’s career. So it’s an exciting job with a great purpose. And I genuinely enjoy Monday mornings.

The Science of Serendipity - Innovation Excellence interview continued...

Here’s more from my interview with innovationexcellence.com (for part one, click here):

Lou Killeffer: In the second chapter, you say, “Innovation is fueled by new insight, a deep understanding of why people do what they do.” Why is that so important?

Matt Kingdon: It’s why they choose what they choose, why they reject what they reject, why they engage in a commentary or dialogue about a brand or product. It’s important because, like it or not, many people are a bit disconnected from why they do particular things. They’ve never thought about it deeply. When you ask them, Why do you buy this brand or product? they either don’t know or they may just tell you what they think you want to hear. So one of the core skills of an innovator is to get under the skin of why people do what they do and understand some of those locked-in feelings and desires. One of the big differences between doing this kind of activity as an innovator rather than a researcher is, as an innovator, you’re constantly thinking about the outcome. You’re outcome-obsessed because innovation is entirely defined by outcomes, by something happening. Innovators are interested in insights, but only insofar as they can stimulate an idea or activity that can be brought to market and deliver value. The search for insights, why people do what they do, is particularly exciting as an innovator. It’s not an academic exercise. It’s a practical exercise.

LK: You go on to say these insights are created by the serendipitous collision of provocative observations. I’d like you to speak to that, but I want to touch on the definition of serendipity in the book.

MK: It’s such a nice word to say; it’s so very mellifluous. But that’s obviously not the reason I chose it. I decided to investigate what serendipity meant, and it took me on quite a journey. There’s a lot of controversy around what it means. There are two accounts. One says serendipity is about happy accidents. The other says it’s about the discovery of things by chance—but not totally by chance, because you’ve tried so many things, you’ve kissed so many frogs, that you were bound to discover something in the end. There’s an element of hard work behind this seemingly lucky concept, and it seems to me that this fits the reality of the innovator’s journey perfectly. I’ve never worked on an innovation project in 20 years that ended up exactly where anyone predicted it would.What always seems to happen is that, if we can fill ourselves with useful stimulus, pursue a clear direction, and have the kind of open, accepting behaviors within a group of people that invite a collision of ideas and insights, we’ll always end up in a place that is 10 times more exciting than where we thought we might.

LK: Powered by, I would suggest, an acute sense of observation. 

MK: Innovators are good listeners, and they’re good observers. I don’t think they’re necessarily creative people—and certainly, in our company, we’ve never used creativity as recruitment criteria. We hire smart people who can connect the dots and have enough emotional intelligence to drive anidea through an organization. And as we know in our daily lives, there are people who are like magnets to ideas, people you want to tell things to because you feel they’re interested in you. Innovators are good at that, and they’re good at creating this magnetic field around themselves that attracts ideas and insights.

LK: The creativity that a good innovator brings is driven, to a degree, by a comfort with ambiguity that traditional creative people have. But you’re combining two things. I never can keep it straight, right brain and left brain, but there’s the observational necessity that’s, one might argue, the science of serendipity. And then there’s the creative aspect of not worrying about what these observations mean, but having the emotional confidence to pull it all together even though you don’t know where it’s headed.

MK: One of the things that we talk a lot about at ?What If! is the importance of being comfortably lost. If you’re in your comfort zone, if you feel you’re exploring things that have been explored before, then, by definition, you’re not going to be innovative. It takes a certain maturity to handle working on assignments like this. We work under a lot of pressure. We have clients who are keen for an outcome, and yet we have to work at a certain pace. We have to have time to explore. We have to lookunder stones where we haven’t looked before, and we can’t guarantee we’re going to find anything under each stone. So you have to be a confident, mature person to go on a voyage of discovery, and you also have to know when to switch from an expansive way of thinking to a reductive way of thinking. Picking up on your theme about the kind of left-right brain types, we don’t call it that at ?What If! We call it expansive thinking and reductive thinking. The typical innovation process is shaped like a Christmas tree. If you can imagine, at the bottom, it has a wider space for more expansive thinking.

LK: Yes.

MK: And it narrows in, and it goes out a bit, it narrows in, and it goes out a bit, and it narrows in, and it goes out a bit—all up to a point at the top. This is the shape of the process of innovation. We’re expanding the opportunity, and then we’re contracting it. Then we’re expanding it a bit more, then we’re contracting it a bit more—and each time we go through a cycle, we’re narrowing the options. And it takes a team of people, because I’ve never met the perfect person with this left- and right-side brain that is equally powered. It takes a team with different skill sets to navigate through an expansive and reductive process.

LK: Matt, you’ve mentioned the pressures of time, of client demands. What are the largest impediments to success for ?What If! or any innovation consultancy? Is it time, money, and the client? Or put another way, when it doesn’t work, what typically gets in the way?

MK: What gets in the way of our company growing or in the way of us being able to innovate brilliantly for our clients?

LK: The latter, which might drive the former.

MK: It may well. The biggest issue in our space is not the quality of the new ideas. It’s the ability to drive them through the client organization so they see the light of the day in all the original beauty with which they were conceived. Making things happen at work is tough, and the bigger the organization the tougher it gets. A lot of this comes down to risk. When organizations are small or when people are early in their careers, they’re more willing to take risks. As we get more senior, we develop more obligations in our lives, our careers become more important, and risk starts to taste different. And like it or not, this dynamic has a creeping impact that can affect people at a large organization in a way they don’t even realize. The presence of self-limiting beliefs in an organization are tough. When we think about how we might achieve something at work, it’s generally possible to do, but it’s equally easy to let your shoulders droop, sit back, and say, “I’ll never be able to do that here” or “That’s just not going to happen here.”

LK: Simple resignation. Hence the need, as you put it, to battle the corporate machine. How does one do that? Is it a cultural issue, an organizational issue, a spiritual issue?

MK: Every organization’s different, but there’s an element of each at play. The one undeniable, organic truth about any organization is that the bigger and more complex it gets, the harder it is to make something happen. There are so many moving parts. The importance of having real alignment around what you’re going for, defining that goal in a way that’s exciting and uplifting, so people feel it affects their mojo, is critical. So that people can come into work feeling excited about the challenge they’re working on. This is important in a large organization. It’s a source of motivation to power yourself through the naysayers and cynics. Being excited about the purpose of the innovation, the good it can ultimately deliver, and the battle that you’re fighting, is important. 

Check back next week for the last installment from this interview.

The Science of Serendipity - Innovation Excellence interview

Recently, I spoke with Lou Killeffer writing for innovationexcellence.com about The Science of Serendipity.

He wrote: “Matt’s passionate about innovation, growth, and the serendipitous outcomes from the collision of observations and insights he sees as fundamental to success. And he’s outspoken about the very human dynamics he sees driving both the people and the process. Matt believes virtually all innovation is powered by ‘anger, paranoia, or ambition’; powered across a rather rugged journey that begins, in large corporations at least, when someone stands up and simply says something must change; something must be done.”

Here’s an edited excerpt of the first part of our conversation; I’ll post a few more bits in the coming days.

Lou Killeffer: Matt, I believe I hold in my hands the only copy in North America of your new book, The Science of Serendipity: How to Unlock the Promise of Innovation in Large Organizations.

Matt Kingdon: Don’t get mugged on the way out. That’s a valuable copy.

LK: Well, let’s start there. Why write a book about innovation today? As you know, there’s a tsunami of words and whitepapers, articles and videos on innovation.

MK: This book is different. It’s a very practical book. Based on 20 years of experience in growing a business of over 250 people now. There are a lot of books out there, but when you take a look at them, a lot are quite theoretical. I wanted to write something very practical, very useful. I wanted to write something that was easier to read than the average businessbook, which as you well know, rarely gets read completely. I wanted to write a business book from the heart about what I know really works.

LK: The book begins for me with my very favorite quote of all time, Pasteur saying chance favors the prepared mind. Why did you select that quote?

MK: The full quote is actually, “In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind.” He was saying that the more homework we do, the more we’ll see, the luckier we’ll get. It’s a bit like that quote attributed to Gary Player mainly: “The harder I practice, the luckier I get.” That’s a wonderful, hopeful, optimistic way of looking at how folks in large organizations can get things done, and almost do the impossible. That is, if they keep themselves open to an external perspective, if they keep debating in a really honest, open way with their colleagues, experimenting, and if theykeep putting themselves through that kind of homework and outreach, they’ll almost inevitably find themselves to be luckier or more serendipitously successful.

LK: You’ve got another quote, new to me, that’s now my second favorite: “Serendipity is looking for a needle in a haystack and finding the farmer’s daughter.”

MK: Isn’t that perfect?

LK: In chapter one, “The Protagonist,” you say, “All innovation is powered by anger, paranoia or ambition.” What a provocative place to begin. What exactly do you mean?

MK: People would like to think that all innovation is powered by strategy, clear thinking, and high principles, but it’s a much more rugged, human activity than that. The people who really make things happen in large organizations are the people driven by some sense of injustice in the world—it may be a customer group that isn’t being served properly, it may be that your brand isn’t getting the share it deserves, it may be that your career could be going further and faster. It’s the kind of thing that eats away at people, some of whom make a decision to do something about it. There’s an element of dissatisfaction with the way the world is in all real innovation, and we shouldn’t shy away from that or be embarrassed about it. I’m not suggesting that people who innovate are necessarily grumpy, but they do have a degree of irreverence for the organization that they’re in and a degree of dissatisfaction with the way the world is.

LK: Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted?

MK: Yeah, something like that.

LK: You’re speaking about fundamentally human and quite emotional drivers. You’re saying innovation’s not simply an intellectual exercise, right?

MK: I’m not saying innovation is unthinking, and I’m not saying innovation doesn’t benefit from good analysis. But I am saying that innovation can be damaged by too many people spending too much time talking. Or that an organization with too much money and too many resources may do too much research. When you dig underneath the skin of why something was innovative, what people will generally tell you was there was a certain critical moment when they made the decision to work harder, to reach out to a different set of colleagues, to push something harder with their colleagues, and these moments are normally a combination of a certain kind of courageous or collaborative behavior. And you’ll find that the heart of so much innovation is a human story, which is uplifting. It says that everybody can innovate. It’s just a question of making things simple, having the right attitude, and having the right behaviors with the group of people you work with. That’s the core message of the book.

LK: As you discuss behavior with the people you’re interacting with, you say, “Innovators are team workers, but more than that, they are collaborators.” What is the distinction between a team worker and a collaborator?

MK: Imagine a sports team. Let’s say a soccer team. And they’ve won a match, and they’re congratulating each other, slapping each other on the back. You know, they may say it was great teamwork that helped them win, but it’s unlikely they’ll say it was great collaboration. That would sound kind of weird. The nature of teamwork is fundamentally different from collaboration, and this is a very, very important point for innovators to get a hold of. A team plays a game where there are clear boundaries. There are the confines of the pitch. The referee or the umpire who sets the rules. It’s clear how you win. There are certain positions to play, and you come and play to your best ability within that position. So teams play with roles and rules. That’s what defines team sports. But when it comes to collaboration, which is a better model for innovation, certainly more disruptive innovation, collaborators work differently. They don’t know who they’re going to be working with. They’re not entirely sure of their position. They’re trying it out. There’s no umpire or referee. And what’s victory? No one’s quite sure. Collaboration has outreach, it has iteration, it has experimentation, it has a degree of self-awareness, and a degree of humility attached to it, which is not necessarily the same as teamwork.

LK: I take your point. Your analogy of the football pitch—the forwards and the backs have individual responsibilities and, if they succeed, the team will succeed. But in a corporate environment, one could say the forwards and the backs are in silos. In collaboration you invade the other person’s silo, isn’t that right?

MK: Many people work in siloed organizations. It’s a matter of choice whether you decide to restrict your point of view to within your silo or you’re prepared to get out of the office, meet new colleagues, meet some customers, and develop a shared obsession with what your customers want. Having a real customer obsession means getting interested in something other than just your company or your brand. And that means working with some colleagues from the finance team or the research-and-development team or the sales team, someone who you’ve bonded with around a singular goal rather than just working in your silos.

More from this interview to come next week...

The Importance of Having a 'Thing'

I’m in Texas on a road trip.   Day One: fly ten hours from London to Houston and then drive three to Austin.  But I’m happy because I had asked the car rental agency for the biggest baddest car they had and they didn’t let me down.
 

I can’t see that many practical advantages driving this beast.  It’s actually not that fast and or well equipped.  But it’s a truck and I’m five feet off the ground and the 5.5L V8 makes a gorgeous gurgle.  That’s the thing here – I’m driving a tank, it’s all about me, king of the effing road and the rest of the planet doesn’t count.

Day Two: we check into Hotel Aloft.  It’s a 70 odd chain owned by Starwood.  It’s a big box with 140 rooms, a trendy reception and I count three staff.   There’s no eating apart from a self-service snack bar (pay receptionist), a self-service gym and a pool table.  Our rooms got cleaned at 5.30pm.  But we like this cool feature free box.  There’s a good shower, free wifi and low prices. 

That’s the thing here – without being barren it’s a no frills approach to overnighting.  We leave feeling smug about our discovery, and now I’m telling all my friends – why pay for amenities you never use?

Two days, two different things.  A gross, two fingers up at the world of auto and a stripped down, stylistic but simple place to sleep - each equally confident in their ‘thing’.  Makes me think how compromises ruin great ideas.  Many would hate my auto or choice of hotel.  But accepting and even enjoying rejection – isn’t this how we really define what’s brilliant about what we’ve got – our ‘thing’?