Dr. Hal Gregersen co-author of The Innovator's DNA - Mastering the 5 Skills of Disruptive Innovators was a guest on my radio show recently. You can listen here.
You can read the first part of our interview here.
The Innovator's DNA - Mastering the 5 Skills of Disruptive Innovators was the result of an 8-year study to uncover the origins of innovative—and often disruptive— business ideas. They interviewed nearly a hundred inventors of revolutionary products and services, as well as founders and CEOs of game-changing companies built on innovative business ideas. In the process they identified five discovery skills that distinguish innovative entrepreneurs and executives from ordinary managers:
Bottomline discovery? Being an innovator depends as much on our behavior as our mind. Change our behavior...change our skills as innovators. I loved this book!
I’m stuck here on the point that we need to generate better and better questions. Where in our educational system, our schools and on-the-job training is that skill developed?
Ah! Great question!
In most places, it doesn’t. That trend, that experience for most of us, started as soon as we went to school, who knows how many years ago.
We know that 4 and 5 year olds love to ask questions. They have thousands of questions they love to ask. Why this, why not that, what about this? They are constantly questioning the world.
When we go to school those questions get shut down. And a brake gets pulled on that’s like an emergency brake that gets pulled on a car. They just stop. Educational researchers have tracked when we go into school and start getting evaluated for what we’re doing in school then we care more about the answers the teachers have and the teachers care less about the questions we might have. Then we go to school, then we go to work after we’ve gone to school for who knows how many years and workplaces don’t foster active questioning.
Let me back that up to a company like Amazon where Jeff Bezos is a questioner. And they systematically train and teach and reinforce throughout the organization to ask why and why-not questions. Here’s how you do it, here’s when you do it, here’s why we need to do it; please ask questions. They simply expect that of their people.
But even if my company doesn’t systematically support me being a better questioner, I can still do it myself. What we’ve discovered is it is a simple question. First of all, innovator’s are always thinking of problems or opportunities they are figuring out a solution to. Where I would start out if I wanted to define a question, define a problem, that matters to us. Could be personal, could be professional. All of us have a problem we don’t have a solution to. Then take the next 4 weeks, take 5 minutes a day and buy a book to be your question journal. And every day, right down nothing but questions about your problem.
And I promise you in a week or two you’ll notice the questions are changing. And at some point you’ll notice a very provocative question that will change a person’s perspective on the problem and lead them to a solution they never would have thought otherwise.
That’s so excellent. I like the approach. I’m just envisioning it for some challenges I face now. Just beginning to baby-step your way to finding a solution.
Can I add just another piece? I bet you have sat in meetings like I have where we’re wrestling with a really tough issue. And we’ve been talking about it, 8 of us sitting in a room, going nowhere, hitting the wall. We can’t seem to get the right solution.
When that moment hits it’s time to step back and say:
“Time for questions. We understand the problem. We understand it as best we can.”
What we do with executive teams in these situations is we start question-storming. So it’s a version of brain-storming but it’s all questions. So, as a team you write down one after the other all the questions you can possibly imagine about the problem.
Demand at least 50 questions. It’s gonna be frustrating at first. But, push to get at least 50 questions. What we find is that people are generating new questions about a problem they care about they really can generate questions that can take them to a new place.
Another great example. Thanks so much.
Of the 5 behaviors which is the one you see as weakest among business executives?
Now, that’s a great question! Again.
I would say Associational Thinking. You know when we act differently by observing the world, posing provocative questions, networking for ideas and experimenting...all of that stuff is foundational for the final piece which is Associational Thinking - Connecting the Unconnected. You know it’s putting together things and ideas that we normally wouldn’t put together.
This is where when you get an idea like the original iTunes or iPod which was essentially connecting the unconnected: What if we put music into a store on the internet with iTunes. What if we connected many hard-drives with MP3 music and a computer with the things, we connectedthe unonnected.
That’s how these things happen. We put together things in a novel, new way.
Well, guess what? For 80% of adults, a great researcher at Harvard Medical School, her name is Shelley Carson, she basically has looked at adults doing associational thinking. What she found was 65-80% of adults find associational thinking exhausting. It’s tiring. It wears them out.
Watch people’s faces when you tell them:
“We’re going to do a brainstorming session”
That’s essentially an attempt to think associationally, to connect the unconnected. A lot of people’s eyes roll.
“Do I have to do that?”
By the time we become adults we just get exhausted trying to do this. it’s not that we don’t know, well we do know how, it’s just we have lost the capacity. As adults we just don’t do it very much. And so, when we’re asked to think creatively it’s just exhausting.
What they found in the study was that if people practice associational thinking enough then they become competent at it and confident in their ability to do it. What was once exhausting is now energizing.
“Got a brainstorming session? Pick me. That would be fun. I’d love to do it.”
They would enjoy it because they would be competent at it. There are things we can do as adults to actively build better associational thinking skills.
We have a lot of managers and entrepreneurs and people in startup businesses who listen to this show. They’re looking for solutions for their business and to create a sustainable business model. What are some of those exercises they can do now to begin to strengthen those associational thinking muscles?
A lot of it at the beginning stage is literally forcing associations.
A colleague of mine, a guy named John Hunt, has written an interesting book called The Art of the Idea. He’s the World Creatve Director for TBWA, one of the greatest advertising companies in the world. When they’re working with companies they do a fascinating thing. They drag a big box of hats and T-shirts from some of the most innovative companies in the world.
So, let’s say we’re working with Coca-Cola, one of the most innovative companies in the world and we’re trying to make them even more innovative. Well, we drag a box of hats and shirts in the room. And they shirts and hats in the box are from Apple and Virgin and Google and Pixar. And what we do is we’re talking about a problem. And what do we do to look at it differently and create some new associations? They literally ask someone to put on the Pixar hat and the Pixar t-shirt and look at the problem through Pixar eyes.
- How would they look at it?
- What would their viewpoint on it be?
- How would they fix this?
And by literally putting ourselves into this company and connecting the unconnected, I may be running a boring company, make shingles for roofs of houses. By looking at it from Pixar’s perspective I might generate a new idea.
But it’s essentially forcing myself to create new associations we wouldn’t otherwise. It might be as simple as opening a book and picking the 4th word on a page and what does my problem have to do with that?
I’m looking at a book right now. I look at the first page and the 4th word I come to. And the 4th word is virtual. What does my problem have to do with ‘virtual’. Well, take a few minutes and think of some potential associations.
I have an application on my iPhone called “Idea Generator”. And basically, you shake the iPhone and you get three random words that come up that you could potentially connect to your problem and see it differently.
So, there’s some fun ways to do this. It doesn’t have to be boring.
I think that besides being fun, it’s also an easy way to stretch that muscle, do it in a cost-effective and time-sensitive manner and do it without people getting bored or burned out from learning this new skill especially as we get older.
Again, it’s being able to collect experiences that make us different. We talked about associational thinking. The same thing could be said for Networking for New Ideas. One of the things people do for this is they talk to people very different from them in order to get new ideas.
And we know from research most people pick friends and co-workers who talk, think and believe like we do. That’s why we like them. They’re like us.
But when it comes to getting new ideas they are the worst people. We have to find the opposite. Somebody who’s a different gender; somebody from a different industry; some body from a different country of origin; somebody from a different political persuasion. If I’m 40 I talk to somebody whos 30. If I’m 30 I talk to somebody who’s 70. It’s getting new perspectives and new ideas.
Now. This is not an expensive thing to do. It might be lunch twice a month with somebody I never go to lunch with. Instead of going to lunch with the same people from the same floor I’m on, pick somebody from a different floor. I’m a programmer? They’re a marketer. Go to lunch with them. Go across to the building next door. I’m in direct sales and we’re selling consumer products and across the way is someone selling industrial motors. You know, whatever. Go to lunch with them and see how they look at the world.
These are not expensive things to do. But they help us generate more interesting ideas.
You remind me of a favorite quote of mine. It keeps coming up. It’s from Ronald Reagan back from whenever he spoke at the Berlin Wall. He said:
Tear down those walls.
I keep thinking about all those walls around those functional silos in a company.
What you’re recommending is a doable step to infiltrate through these walls and make and associate with people of different thinking.
Absolutely. And when I hear about these walls in companies...if I were to walk into those worlds where the walls are big and strong in the organization, I would bet next year’s salary for me....we have a self-assessment where people can find where they stand on these skills, I would bet within these walls of these territorial companies, these discovery skills don’t get used very much at all.
Part of what that reflects is when we build these walls in these companies, we forget why we are even there. We forget who are the customers we are really serving. What are their issues. What matters deeply to them.
I’ll never forget working with a company with the senior managers and they were talking about big issues and all of a sudden the founder of the company said
“Wait a minute. Where is the voice of the customer in this conversation? How many of you have connected and taken the time to really understand the consumer’s viewpoint on this thing? How do they look at the problem? We’re just missing the boat completely.
And so, I think a lot of those highly-silo’d-deep-thick-wall type of companies have a lot of people sitting in their offices doing their job and focusing on their little area. And what they also have is a lot of people who aren’t engaging these innovators in these skills. And they’re stuck within their space.
Thank you. Another great answer.
You write in your book about T-Shaped People and how they increase our stock of ideas? Who are these t-shaped people and how do they help us create a lot of these new ideas?
T-shaped people have, they have like a T, the line going up and down which is a deep vertical expertise in some particular area. It might be technology; it might be marketing or finance or whatever. It is a deep, deep, understanding of that domain.
Steve Jobs has a deep understanding of consumer electronics. He goes deep there. He also has breadth. That’s not the only world he lives in. you go back to the different parts of Steve Jobs’ life and you know, living in an ashram in India for awhile taught him the value of silence. Meditation in a very silent space. When they were trying to figure out the Apple II he said:
“ I am completely annoyed with those fans on these original early PCs that sounded like they were engines on airplanes. “
And it’s like:
“How could we do this differently? “
And his experience in the ashram led him to question this experience and why do we have these noisy fans that ultimately led him to a guy named Holtz who found a completely different way of generating power. they could create a computer that didn’t need a fan.
The same thing could be said for his excursion into calligraphy. Who could have guessed that calligraphy and sitting in on calligraphy classes would have led to a WYSIWYG font on a computer screen.
I could keep going. But it’s having clear depth and expertise as an expert. But it’s getting out of that by literally expanding our horizon at the top of that t by exposing ourselves to a lot of different experiences.
Who are Tata and Nano? What role did observational skills and a vuja de experience play with their success?
Ratan Tata is an Indian by birth and had lived in India for quite some time. He’d probably seen millions if not billions of families in his lifetime sitting on and riding one of these small scooters. If you have a chance to get outside the US, it’s really common to see an entire family sitting on a small motor-scooter.
He was sitting in his car on the way to work. Monsoon season is driving the rain down on the car. All of a sudden he finally saw for the first time those people. We’ve all heard of Deja Vu when we think we’ve seen something from the past. But this is Vuja De where we see something for the first time.
That’s what happened to Ratan Tata. He finally saw what we happening with these people.
- Is their lot in life to ride on these motor-scooters in the rain.
- Isn’t there something better we can do?
And he went back to his company that built different kinds of vehicles. And he said:
“We’ve got to find a solution. Let’s create some kind of vehicle that’s inexpensive enough that they can ride in a car instead of a motorcycle and be soaked.”
He scoured the world. Got all kinds of technologies together. Incredible, thousands of innovations to make the Tata Nano car which is a little over $2000 US.
Once they built it they had a problem: now they had to sell it. A low-price point car like that doesn’t get sold through typical dealerships. Most of the scooters for families riding on scooters get sold in little villages. A trucks pulls up. They’ll pull the scooters out. People will buy them and they’ll ride off.
That works fine for a scooter in India. Tata sent people out to get some astute observations about how scooters are sold and how could they sell Nanos. And what they realized was they would have to setup an entire on-site infrastructure to make it work.
When you sell a car you gotta have a driver’s license; most people didn’t. When you sell a car you gotta have insurance different from motorcycles; most people didn’t have car insurance. When you sell a car, you gotta have service and support....
So, essentially they set up a licensing operation, an insuring operation and a teach-you-to drive-the-car operation so that people could drop into that village and get what they needed in terms of skills and certifications and drive away with the car.
It was an incredible experience not only in generating that car but using their observational skills in understanding how could we sell it to people in such a way that they could use it and walk away with it.
You can read part three of our interview.